where to get steemit questions answered?

As a newbie I have a million questions regarding Steemit, the biggest one right now being...

• How do I get Steem Dollars? Only through upvoting? Can I deposit into SD? I so, how, as I can not find any way to do that. I can only promote my content with SD, but I can only get SD with upvoting content that get exposure? That can't be right.

But nowhere can I find a steemit forum, not on reddit, not at http://www.steemitforum.com/ (down), not here, not on https://steem.slack.com/ (deleted)... Surely there must be a steemit help forum somewhere, no?

Where do people go to get answers, especially newbies, like me, who are trying to get their head around the steemit community? I mean, I do not even know what a "whale" is and why/how they want/can do the good/offensive things I read about here. What actually defines a whale? SD? SP? Girth?

Some of my many other questions are .... (ast asking for answers here, just expressing a a newbie's perspective)

• How has no one created a subreddit yet?
• How many users does Steemit actually have and what can one see its growth stats?
• What does the 50/50 power up mean, as opposed to the 100%? Are there pros/cons of using one or the other?
• Is SD the only way I can promote my post ?
• What is a 'witness", what do they do? why are they important? why should I be one? It sounds very 'religious" :/
• The docs say that rep is -10 to 10, but they is clearly out of date as my rep it 54. So what is the new scale of rep, and how is that exactly determined?