steemit is not an mmo

Of course it is. It's a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. It is Massively Multiplayer Online and it is a Role Playing Game. Your account is your character. You are roleplaying it. All social networks are MMORPGS. No difference in the underlying reality whether you're an axe wielding Orc in Wow or an artist on imgur. From the systems perspective it's the same thing. And the most fragile and complex mechanisms in MMORPGs, by far, are their economies.

But it's not like these things haven't been studied extensively for almost two decades now. There's billions of dollars in these games' economies. Virtual moneys way before this crypto wave. To ignore all this experience and knowledge and just plunge ahead with your whitepaper written on a piece of toilet paper and no knowledge whatsoever what happens when you introduce a currency into a heterogenous, anonymous population following an arbitrary set of rules is... not smart.

But ok, let's start at the beginning... 1999 to be precise. Yes, almost 20 years ago.
He who doesn't know history is doomed to repeat it.
http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html
The In-game Economics of Ultima Online
Zachary Booth Simpson, Origin Research Fellow
7 Apr 1999