Steemit does need a referral program. But it should be designed to thwart the attempts of spammers and botnet owners.
We've all seen those "porn referral" links, where someone spams 5 million people with a porn referral link. Someone gets the same email list, and spams the same 5 million people with a different referral link.
Soon everyone gets their mailbox full of "referral links" from about 25 different spammers, which makes them not want to visit the link anymore.
Soon spam filters start filtering out emails with steemit (or some referral domain) as the URL, and soon it totally thwarts the whole initiative.
So if someone can come up with a referral system that spammers and botnets can't participate in, then I'm all ears. :)
I should also mention we have split tests on all pages - to make sure we monitor conversion rates and adjust content based on that.
@intelliguy We have a few ways to monitor that, FIFO cookies or LILO cookies. We also monitor a few other things. Any affiliate referral abuse will be handled with extreme prejudice.
The referral program we worked on with BTS was designed to do that, but we didn't get far enough on deving out the whole workflow on some of the KYCish type of tactics needed to deal with spammers. At least not when I was working on that problem.