Sorry for that, but I will use all my power to flag any suggestion about referral links. This would only makes Steemit looks more scamy!
Whenever I see a referral link from someone to a platform which I do not know, I am asking myself: how you want to screw me??
And final reason why Steemit should not have a referal program is... because Steemit already have one, a better one, organic, smart and self-healing - "followers".
When you do a proper introduction of Steemit to someone, one thing is almost certain. It is trivial to convince this person to follow you. This person will always remember you, because you were the person which introduce him to this great Steem ecosystem. You will get almost always votes from this person, just because of this fact.... as long as you are providing a value to the platform
unless... you will suddenly become a bad actor.
If will will do something bad for the platform, this person will have a choice to stop rewarding you. This guarantee that you will be always properly motivated to do good things.
Another reason why automated referal link is far from perfect:
because It is easy to easy to onboard 1000 a day, when you can lie to them, because you do not need to care about the truth. You can say anything about Steemit, just to push as mamy people through a registration point. With suggested by you referal system, there would be a lot of people which would not care about proper onboarding of people. And proper onboarding always takes much more time.
[edit]: unflagged
100% agree. We would end up with mass referrals of people who sign up and don't stick around. The resources wasted on this will cause more performance issues.
Maybe unpopular viewpoint but I don't think sign up process or new accounts acquisition is the right metric to target. Steem's problem is retention, people are leaving for various reasons, but downvoting, censorship, concentrated steempower and money driven undesirable behavior (like spam, scam and bots) are common arguments for leaving the platform. These issues must be adressed and quality content must be rewarded in order for Steemit to become the place everyone wants to be and to stay active.
Repeating what we said in chat ... it already exist.
And there are ways to incentivize it without it being "scamy"[sic] .
Please remove your flag @noisy.
My flag was as gentle as possible (I used only a small porion of my voting power, not even enough to make it hidden by default). I do not want to punish you as a person, but this flag helps me express my opinion how terrible idea this is.
I am open to discussion. Why my reasoning do not resonates with you? Could you help me understand with which part of my explanation you do not agree?
Does uber or coinbase look scammy to you? Because they both use referal programs.
In case of Uber no one ask questions like "from where those money came from".
That's a perception issue not a referal one.
Honestly @noisy idgaf about your opinion or ideas. I simply expressed mine broflagger.
Tuck's suggestion is a legitimate one that should be discussed. Even if you disagree, you should not flag. Let the community decide.
You know... you are right. I wrote my explanation, why I think this is a bad idea. Open discussion will be better.
I should flag your .34c away for irony. ;)
There are always different ways of referral systems that can be discussed, I am also sceptic towards it in general as of scammy shit I saw enough - if it is a one off based on certain criteria, why not? I would like it when the referral system is 8 levels deep - you get paid 10% of all your downline rewards lifetime. Sounds promising :-)