I love everything you did except... a referral program.

Busy now allows you to earn rewards by inviting your friends into the Busy ecosystem. Sending your referral link (http://busy.org/i/@your-username) will grant you 10% of the rewards of the new member for a period of 30 days. You can find your referral link on this page if you already logged on: https://busy.org/invite.

Referral links always are sending a wrong message to invited people. It is like saying implicitly "I will earn money thanks to you!".

Steem is already mind blowing for 99% people. Most of us didn't believe that Steem was legit, before we truly understand it. New people do not trust Steem by default, because Steem offers something they think is impossible. It is almost impossible to grasp from where those money came from...

A referral link will be yet another thing which will make Busy.org and Steem looking even more suspicious.

Whenever someone gives me a referral link (especially in crypto space) I am asking myself a question: "how this person is going to screw me over?"

Referral links are not needed

Steem is a blockchain-based social network. Every good social network is all about informal connections. Not technical connections like "referral links".

Steem already has much better a referral program - organic one

Do you remember the person who introduced you to bitcoin & crypto? Of course you do! Those kinds of events for many people become life changing events. You do not forget who made your live potentially better and for sure much more interesting.

This mean, that probably there is very high chance, that you feel very high sentiment to this person. And of course you are going to be biased when you will judge everything what this person will do, therefore people vote more often for people, which introduce them to Steem.

Also, if I invited someone to Steem and this person is successful, this person knows that I do not benefit from that directly, therefore my actions were from the beginning truly altruistic.

If I am a good and active Steemian there is very high chance, that this person will not only follow me, but also will support me by voting on my good posts.

Organic referral program is safer and more efficient to the network

But imagine a scenario that for any reason I become a bad actor of Steem. With organic referral program, a person who used to upvote my stuff will simply stop doing this. This person will have a chance to stop support me - and this is safer approach. I know that I need to behave in a good way to continue benefit from being a Steemian. This is safer to the network.

Also, this is more efficient for the network. Why? Because I need to still be active Steemian, to have a chance to be rewarded from my activity. If I will invite 1000 people and decide to abandon Steem, why I should still get rewards thanks to other people for next 30 days?

Referral links will be yet another reason to abandon Busy and move to Steemit

We all now, that you can execute the rules of referral program only with rewards beneficiers feature (please correct me if I am wrong), so that means, that referral program works only if a person will use Busy to publish a post.

That means, that to maximize a rewards people will be actually incentive to move to Steemit. It will not take long for someone to build a "helpful bot" which will publish a comments like "do you know that you can increase your earning by 10% simply by moving to Steemit from busy". Such bot will bring potentially useful message to people, so there is a high change, that actually those people will upvote those comments - so there is a big incentive to actually build such a bot.

If not a referral program, then what?

Well... you can create a lot of potentially much better features, which will benefit a users and system in the long run. For example:

Favorites Authors (exclusive following)

You already have great notification system - use it! When a new user setup an account, ask him which people he would like to add to "favorites authors". They you can suggest this with a message:

"It is not a bad idea, to add to favorites a person which invited you to Busy. Then you will be notified about all new entries of this person. Busy will also check what are favorites authors of this person and we will suggest them to you, so you will be able to decide whether you would like to follow them or maybe even add them to favorites authors as well."

Option to split rewards with someone

When someone write a post, you can ask this person, whether he would like to split a reward with someone. If that will be a first post, you can suggest that it is not a bad idea, to split a reward with someone, who invited you to Busy. This should be voluntary... and a people should be able to give any percentage to this person. So maybe someone will decide to give 20%, 50% or 100% from a post to someone.

With such a feature users will be incentivized to focus first on bringing big players to Steem and onboarding them as they were kings, because 50% or 100% from introduceyourself-post of some big star can be much much more than 10% from a lot of small fishes.

Other options

I am pretty sure, that there are planty of other better ways to increase acquisition of new users by Busy. It is also obvious that referral systems have a bad connotation and... for sure and not very innovative. I believe that team of Busy.org can do much better than that.

Sincerely, big fan of Busy.org,
@noisy