Yes @hiveonboard!
This is really important as part of creating a solid and thriving community.
However, some very important limitations need to be built into such a referral system. TOP of the list is countermeasures against the inevitable referral spam which will lead to potentially millions of "dead" accounts.
I would suggest downplaying the reward end of a referral system completely, so that it is effectively only attractive to people who are making a long term commitment to Hive. What do I mean?
When you refer someone, you don't get squat till that person has (a) been a member for at least a month, AND (b) has created an introduceyourself post AND (c) has actually completed some minimal amount of community interaction, like commented five times and voted on 10+ pieces of content.
"Dead accounts" is a HUGE issue in referral systems and network marketing, so any kind of "short term gain" thinking should be taken OFF the table as much as possible so the only real beneficiaries are those who are serious about building long term community and bringing onboard potentially serious new members.
I think it would also be essential to "tie" new referrals to whomever referred them (not the dApps, the individuals) in order to facilitate encouragement of newbies.
Let's say someone creates an account because they saw a post I created on Facebook. If I am "tied" to that person, it would be easy for me to follow them, AND perhaps to give them a 25HP delegation for a month to encourage them to be active.
I don't come at this from the technical end, I come at it from loads of involvement in network/relationship marketing for 30-odd years.
Wow great feedback, much appreciated!
I understand your concerns about the "Dead accounts" issue.
The best countermeasure against it, from my point of view, is to don't give any incentives for just referring an account alone.
As written in this post, it's required that the referred user is going to use HIVE as it's intended and bring value to the platform: creating quality content. Since a quality post can generate thousand times much post rewards than multiple low quality post - I can't think of any scenario, where creating endless accounts would generate any referral rewards at all.
I would agree, if a referred user would receive some-kind of welcome reward - which would ultimately lead to the referral spam you pointed out.
Really cool that you mentioned the idea of "tie" a user to his referral. That's exactly what I have done with @hiveonboard (but not announced yet).
If a referred user has created an account, I'am sending out 2 memos: 1 for the referred person and 1 for the referrer in order to create a connection.
Just check out the 0.001 transactions seen in here:
https://peakd.com/@hiveonboard/wallet
This sounds like a great idea, I have no doubts that a referral system is exactly what some people need to introduce others to Hive, and more importantly, to help them grow. I have brought some of my friends here, but I reckon that sometimes one needs an incentive to teach them more than just the basics, and to help them reach a larger audience.
Dead accounts are a no issue. If you don't help people set foot, you simply earn nothing from them. I don't see the problem