@noisy, thank you for your input, such a great feedback! I can't agree more!
I know your position on that since we discussed about it at Lisbon/Steemfest, and i share totally share your point of view.

As said in this post, I try to work in open decision-making with Busy and not take a dictatorship approach, and we actually discussed and debated about this feature with @fabien who is behind this idea/initiative and is advocating it.
He might be in a better position to answer you about this as I was totally against the referral idea for the exact same reasons you're pointing out.

This is a good example of a feature that was implemented without full consensus and where we were not aligned with @fabien. He was so enthusiastic about it, that we actually decided to let this be implemented and tested to gather more feedback like the one you just did. Really appreciate and hope it will convince more people that it's not a very good idea and open discussions with other argument for this feature, so we can improve/polish it or remove it.

Deadlocks can be broken quickly (by our founders @fabien or @ekitcho) if consensus doesn't emerge immediately after discussion.

This is a good reason for which i feel the need to be transparent so the community can see how we are doing things and try stuff, gather feedbacks and then improve/revert/ it.

November:



I think i've given all argument i had against this feature, and you add a lot @noisy.

@fabien actually decided to implement it anyway because he believes Busy/Steem will benefit from it (I don't), and need to test it and take feedbacks from the community. (And I think it's ok and a Beta is there for this specific reason: Testing things) I decided to let this go and see how the community and great minds from our ecosystem will react.

As far as I can tell @fabien is not alone on this position. I think Steemit.inc is also discussing about invite system and I remember @andrarchy gave some good argument for this, so the debate is still open. Happy to see you backing up my position ;)

It's not a pro/cons debate in my pov we can also find other ways to implement it and set different incentives or parameters to align short-run individual interests and long-run social (community/ecosystem) interests, as well as public perception...