I would argue that many of the Cryptocoins and Tokens are a scam, since many of them have some whitepaper and story what they want to deliver as a service, but the service is not delivered. Ok, I know the different way of looking at coins and tokens, that these can have value even without any service or product, and that is in essence true. Any currency has value as long as we have trust in the currency, and in the end it is the trust that needs to be build. One can then argue that when the trust is increased, the value of the coin/token against others becomes higher, especially when the amount of the coins/tokens is limited.

For Steem, about 40.000 new Steem is added to the reward pool daily. Assuming we have to split that with 40.000 active users writing each 1 post per day (purely hypothetical), each post get an average of 1 Steem. Since we see posts in Trending channel each day with hundreds of dollars/Steem, and we see quite a few comments with 10s of dollars (Steem), it is therefore for sure that many posts will get less than the 1$. Now, if we increase the number of active users and/or the amount of posts per active users with a factor of 10, we suddenly have only 0,1 Steem available as an average for all posts. When number of active users increases, you could think the value of Steem will also increase somehow, however, that may not be the case since currency price is not at all related to the number of active users. It would be more related to the amount of Steem purchased at exchanges, the number of power downs happening and so on. So yes, your statement Steem/Steemit itself requires a pyramid is absolutely true!