I hope you don't mind, I will reply to both comments in this one. -Also the picture is good, as sometimes I wonder if I'm a 3rd grader.
So in SMTs this referral system would be an optional feature to be enabled on the tokens, where this function is needed. Incentive being to bring more people to Steemit and communities, and the promoter to receive rewards up to a given point based on the new creator's contribution.
A referrers rep/rate/rank to display their competence at promoting service provided.
My issue involves people creating trees of fake accounts in place of real users. Looks good, as long as there is no initial bonus for referring. Offering too large of a reward would lead to this type of activity I feel.
I apologize for the brief comment, will be revisiting later in the day.
Right, at least in my opinion, it is a design flaw to restrict flexibility as this restricts the ability of the system to evolve. So we would want to offer as many choices as we can to SMT token issuers if it were up to me anyway. The affiliate program is just the "decentralized marketing option" which SMT token issuers can utilize. Reputation options should be something they can activate to protect their community from the obvious sybil attack that you described, so I like your idea and I hope the Steem developers are reading our discussion.
This is true. The way Bitconnect solved it was requiring a lockup of value. So you had to lock up $100 worth of value to participate in the affiliate program. Then if you want to move up the ranks you have to prove you are good at bringing in loan $ and so on. Sure a person could bring themselves in but they would have to pay a lot of money.
This is a problem worth looking deeper into. The issue with a person creating 1000 fake accounts to fool the affiliate program is legitimate, so reputation scores do help but then what score do we use? The reputation from blogging doesn't tell us that much.
Some people use their real name, and video blog. In those cases it's pretty obvious. Perhaps require people to earn their way into certain programs, or to sign up to join and simply collect enough information to make sure it's not a bot, or fake person.
Not saying we need know your customer but this could be used and if that is used then it cannot be gamed at all. Perhaps leave it up to the SMT issuer. I actually like the idea of requiring a lock up in value as a means of filtering out sybil attacks better than KYC.
Hello @dana-edwards,
I apologize for my late reply. I feel that earning into a program through account qualification would be the best solution to ensure that people are genuinely participating and are not trying to deceive others. The MLM you describe that each SMT could do is pretty sound, along with the aforementioned lock up of investment/funds you've described above.
As long as there is no interest to be gained in referring, or having it capped out at a certain amount would ensure not to overrun budget. This is overall a pretty good idea to help bring more value to STEEM.
Great job!
shello
The commission rate needs to be dynamically adjusting by algorithm.
The rate is in dollars and this would have to be variable rate. The budget also would be in dollars and would be variable based on the token price. So just at 1 BTC isn't worth more or less than 1 BTC, but that 1 BTC is always changing in how much it is worth in dollars, the budget also would be tokens and those tokens would always change in how much they are worth in dollars if they choose to use a percentage of their SMTs as "budget". They could also use Steem Dollars as "budget" and have a fixed amount in dollars.
In this way the issuer of the SMT would have the flexibility to either have a fixed budget in dollars or a dynamically adjusting budget in tokens, but in any case the percentages of commissions should be determined by algorithm not by people.
In this way the humans never have to be concerned about managing the budget for marketing. The budget will be self managing and the percentages dynamically changing from week to week or day to day.
A sliding scale based on market price is pretty standard protocol, my bad- You right. What I thought was the kicker here is that the budget could also be factored as a set amount in SBD, I feel like that's actually a really good application of the currency, since Steem-backed Dollars are always supposed to be close to $1 USD.
Overall, I can see you did a lot of research and thought hard on the different ways SMTs can be used for referrals. The people who decide to make a token, wouldn't be stuck running their systems all the same way, and each program could be better tailored to the community it will represent.
I really hope they do this, it would help raise the value by a lot.