Has anyone here tried out steemit? (steem)

It's kinda like reddit, but with potential monetary rewards for "good" content. Though steemit whales have massive power over making what they deem good content to get rewards and appear on the home page (as well as anyone with deep pockets buying massive voting power, seems like a floored system to me).

It's got quite a lot of controversy going around about it being a Ponzi scheme, and I'll be the first to admit I don't quite know how it works.

And it seems the steem market price has been going down ever since it's initial spike a few weeks ago.

As you may have guessed I'm still a little skeptic about it, and not quite sure to what the real world monetary rewards are for say a post that gets $4000 steem, from what little time I've spent on it, it seems it might not be that much, at least not at where the current markets are at, as you have to convert steem to bitcoin to dollars. (I think)

Thoughts?

PS, if you're interested and have some time to kill then go and read the Steem whitepaper - https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf