Earlier today I read a post from @Hilarski where he proposes a referral program.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

"What is the biggest problem we have as a platform? Frankly it is the difficulty of using it. Many people who are not technical come to Steemit, try to post and get frustrated because it is not intuitive like other social networks. Now imagine if I was vested in the success of that new user. I would feel more obliged to help them with their first few posts. The problem is that it takes time to teach people. Most people, 95% in fact will not make the effort to learn on their own like we did."

My response was:

"I am against referrals. There is a set amount of Steem created every day. That would take away a piece of the pie that could be used to pay content creators and curators."

Hilarski's reply was:

"Referrals as part of the profits of the content generated by the new writers. If they are good the referrer does well. If they don't perform they earn nothing."

I was writing a long reply so I figured that it's better to make a post about it...So here it is:

Taking part of the profits is still taking a piece of the pie from the the reward pool allocated to the content generators. Currently there are 5 categories of participants that get paid from the network:

1-Content generators.
2-Curators.
3-SP holders.
4-SBD holders.
5-Witnesses & miners.

A referral program would add another category.

The payment to the referrers needs to come from somewhere:

a)From the general reward pool or,
b)from the rewards earned by the content generators that were referred.

With the first option someone in the above list needs to take a pay cut.

With the second option we would end up with 2 types of content generators:

1-Those who pay a royalty to the person that referred them.
2-Those that earn full rewards.

Having 2 classes of content creators will lead to a perception of inequality and could divide the community.

If it's done voluntarily by some sort of smart contract I would not have any problem with it. Let's say a mentoring program where you agree to pay part of your rewards for x amount of time or x amount of posts to who is on-boarding you to the platform. But there would need to be full disclosure of all the options including the fact that you can sign up without a referral but...

If the main argument is that Steemit is difficult to use (as shown above) then the solution is simple:

Make a better interface not a referral program

Images from Pixabay