@roadscape told me to check it out around the time it launched, it took me a couple of weeks to get around to reading the whitepaper, and another month to sign up. I got here just in time for the 4th of July when the rewards started paying out. It was great to see all of the familiar handles from the bitsharestalk forums, the progenitor community of Steem. The awesome part about Steem: you get high quality discourse (as were the bitshares forums), but now you can do it for every topic, not just block chains and austrian economics.