I'm getting this question a lot lately so let me just nail it down once and for all.
No. You're not late to the party. Actually, it's still crazy early. The first steem payout happened just one month ago, on July 4th, 2016. To get some perspective, let's look at the first cryptocurrency's timeline for a moment.
Bitcoin began in 2009 and was worth basically nothing at first. A handful of computer geeks around the world started to recognize and appreciate its usefulness so adoption slowly grew over the next few years. It finally became user-friendly enough for wider adoption and spiked in popularity in the spring of 2013. That year, the price of a single bitcoin rose from $14 to over a thousand dollars. Fortunately for us, steem is already user-friendly enough so we can skip over the first few difficult years that bitcoin had to endure. We also don't have to worry about government regulation because steem isn't traded on exchanges directly for legal tender. Bitcoin did most of the heavy lifting and paved the way for us already so the rise of steem could potentially be much swifter than that of its pioneering predecessor.
Of course nobody can see the future for certain and I can't make any promises so I'll just toss-in one last point for the sake of perspective.
We got our first steem for free, just for joining this website.
It cost us nothing. We already post content on social media for free anyway so if we just post it here and accumulate some steem along the way, it's still costing us nothing to build up a nest egg that could be worth a thousand times more next year.
As far as I can see, there's no downside. Of course you could buy steem with money from outside of the platform, in which case, it would be a gamble like any other investment, but I'm not advising that. If you want to gamble, that's fine, but all I'm talking about here is using the Steemit website as it's meant to be used and saving up the steem power you accumulate along the way. Since we're not losing anything, we can just relax and think of every penny that comes from this as a gift from the crypto-gods. Every little bit you gain is reason enough to smile and who knows? If steemit grows up to be at least as big as bitcoin, the little bit we make now will be worth a heck of a lot more later. When that day comes, we'll hear a whole lot of people saying that they wish they had joined back when steem was only worth a couple of bucks... like we did. :)