Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that one yet. I remember there being another one which if you digged deep enough you'd find the roots of it being to someone connected to Bitcoin and/or Tone Vays who has been calling it a scam even without even knowing that the Steem Blockchain actually saves data that peoples post publicly and open-source.
This is something that is happening everywhere. I remember when there was only bitcoin and I kept telling people in r/investing on reddit about it. It always got a very very negative response. They also told me stuff like your friend "I better just put it in stock this and that - bitcoin sounds stupid and scammy". Look at it now, you can buy someone reddit gold with bitcoin.
The most ridiculous thing here is that Steem is being put in a bad light from Bitcoiners who should know better what gives a currency its value. I think they are just pissed off that they put in so much money into centralizing the mining scene and don't want to accept that proof-of-stake is already secure and safe to use, thanks to Dan and the team. They don't want to admit that wasting millions of dollars per day in electricity is a shitty way of going forward in the future and scaling, buying computers that you can only do 1 thing with and are useless if Bitcoin would hardfork and go proof-of-stake which Ethereum is planning on doing.
It could very well just be jealousy, jealous people who were a part of the platform since the start and might be trying to bring it down so their own stack of another currency doesn't lose any value. They fail to realize that bitcoin is the worst at getting people interested in cryptocurrencies and their true innovation, they like to throw the word faucet around which is just ridiculous and they like to hoard their stacks for future profits and greed.
They also fail to realize that they should thank Steem for being able to introduce this great innovation to the masses in a much simpler way that is being worked on making it even simpler with development. Thank them that with the income of millions of users into the tech they might still find some use to use bitcoin for storage or big and safe transactions, cause in the microtransaction section they have failed miserably and let it go on for way too long without adapting.
That'sa bit mixed with speculation but something I've started to give more thoughts about lately, the alt-coin markets have proven to take over more and more of the total cap of block-chain stocks over the last years.
Tell your friend that its worth re-searching more and not trust the first or second link on google he might find, there is a lot of misinformation going around in today's internet. Cryptocurrencies are not the only ones effected in this.