It is a good question and I'm glad you asked it. A couple of reasons STEEM isn't a ponzi. For starters there was a Proof Of Work stage that allowed people to mine the coin up front in an attempt to have a more fair distribution. It was messed up and the distribution ended up not being what most would consider fair but there were outsiders who were able to gain a considerable amount of coins for a couple hundred dollars worth of electricity.

Also the platform doesn't use deception to entice others into investing into it. Everything is transparent here and you can check people's wallets and see where coins are moving and all that.

Also there can be no "exit scam" for STEEM. Even if Steemit.com went down and never came back up we could all go to Busy.org, ChainBB, Dtube.video, Zappl, Steepshot.....etc and interact with the blockchain and still earn rewards. With Shitconnect they can just disappear in the middle of the night and their "loans" are all database driven so there would be no way to recover the value of that supposed contract if they disappeared.

The main reason is that while the creators of STEEM did get rich from STEEM it was because people bought into it based on the utility of the currency and the platform and it is very transparent how the system works. With Shitconnect people are buying into a deceptive mechanism where they are claiming there is a trading bot but there is no evidence of such a bot and there certainly would be if it really did exist.

I do have an open mind and pretty much everyone has determined that Shitconnect is in the Scam category.