I wouldn't go so far as to call it a scam, but I do think it was just developed more as a "proof of concept" than anything else.
Yes, their "beta" is live for the last few months, but according to many users, it is not a beta, more of an "alpha" and at times, just about usable.
There are many issues with the platform, mostly relating to speed, pages loading/not loading, ability to post images in posts (how hard can that be??), the inability to see your own posts, etc. The Sapien team are aware of this, particularly after a group of users who invested in the ICO formed a Telegram group to discuss their concerns and presented these to the team. Did anything happen? Yes and no. Some issues got fixed, but quite a lot did not. It is quite clear that Sapien have NO developers working on this project.
Their statistics do not make sense. This articles lists two of them - which sound ridiculous when placed side-by-side.
https://www.investinblockchain.com/sapien-shatters-user-growth-projections/Sapien claims to have "4,000 active daily users", yet also boasts that "since June, 10,000 posts have been created on the platform".
So - 4,000 active daily users have only managed to create 10,000 posts in a period of almost 3 months???
As someone who uses the platform, I can confirm that their "active daily users" figure is a lot closer to 40 than it is to 4000.
As for their original raison d'etre of "fighting fake news", not only are they clueless in how to achieve this, but they seem to actively encourage fake news on the platform, particularly in relation to political posts. Ill-informed or blatantly incorrect material is not removed, just left to sit there, even after it has been reported as fake. Thankfully, most of their userbase is only interested in crypto, so the political propaganda spread by a couple of professional trolls does not hold much sway. However - "fighting fake news" - not a chance...
Since the introduction of their "Rewards Engine" a few weeks ago, users get paid to comment or upvote a certain number of posts each week. So, any post is going to get upvotes and meaningless comments, simply because people want to earn more tokens.
And lastly, not only does Sapien not have 4,000 active daily users, but it does not have the infrastructure to cope with that many. It is slow and laggy even with the small amount of users it has at the moment. It needs a serious amount of work if it intends to scale or gain any kind of wider adoption. And since their "development team" - if they ever had any - appear to have either lost interest or moved on, this is looking extremely unlikely.
Before anyone accuses me of spreading FUD, all of the above is from my own personal experience of using the site. I was very supportive of Sapien in the beginning and I do hold SPN tokens. However, would I consider them a good investment at the moment? No.