Really? No social media experience before this platform? That's very interesting, never thought of Steemit as a first time entry point for people to get on social media!
In terms of it as a blogging/writing tool, it's actually done pretty well. I've been using wordpress for several years and Steemit is very easy to use. Basic formatting of text can quickly be grasped with the use of Markdown and I really like the ease of importing images. YouTube embedding is completely straightforward. All in all, they've done a good job in this aspect and if there's something to fix, it's really just small details.