Components
This suggestion affects the split of curation rewards and also the signup process to Steem (plus relevant spaces in documentation).
Proposal
Currently there is no built-in mechanism for Steem to reward those who market the system to others users. While it is advisable to avoid any kind of approach that resembles multi-level marketing, it is still very possible to offer rewards to users who introduce their friends and contacts to the Steem eco-system and I suggest here that doing so will give a good boost overall.
A simple and elegant solution here is to allow users to invite other potential users using an extended registration URL (and for new users to also nominate a referring user manually on signup). The referring user will then receive an automatic curation reward from all post made by the new user for a certain time period. The curation reward can come from the existing 25% curation reward offered to other curators, meaning that the new user does not lose out on anything as a result.
Technically, we might label this new reward as being for 'external curation' as the user is 'finding the best content (creators) from outside of Steem and being rewarded for it.
The time period that the rewards last and the percentage of the curation boost that is awarded could, if necessary, be defined according to an 'invitation power' scale in a similar way to the way that voting power is currently scaled in relation to how much is used. For example, this would mean that the first user i invite (and who signs up) in a day or week would result in me receiving a full curation bonus from his/her posts for a specific time period (perhaps 3 weeks) - then the second user I invite (and who signs up) in will result in me receiving slightly less curation bonus than I received for the first. This is to dampen the possibility for exploitation of the invitation system in cases where people create their own new accounts and 'invite themselves' while then bidding up their own posts. The 'Invitation Power', like 'Voting Power' can regenerate over an appropriate time period.
Abusing this feature may not be particularly profitable as compared to other forms of 'abuse', such as massive self voting or 'circle jerk' collusive self-voting groups, since all that is gained by this new feature for the creator of the new account is a relatively higher amount of curation reward as compared to the other upvoters of the posts from the new account. If the new account is explicitly created to be part of a 'circle jerk' among whales, then it is perhaps unlikely that the posts will be receiving upvotes from many other users anyway, so the relative gain for the 'referrer' will be low.
Mockups / Examples
The signup fields on user facing UIs could include a new referral user field:
Benefits
Not only will this inspire many people to sign up to Steem, but it may also inspire existing users of Steem to invest resources into promoting Steem on other platforms and in other ways, as they attempt to gain increased rewards from their marketing actions.
This bonus will effectively trigger an entirely new class of activity for Steem that can act as a significant booster for the platform as it expands to increase market share.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors