Does steemit need a referral reward system? Recruit a Friend to steemit - CONTEST PROPOSAL?
Steemit needs more members.
More importantly it needs more active users, and it needs to improve its retention rate.
A common recruitment method for many online platforms is a referral reward system.
Steemit doesn't yet have a referral reward system and as far as I know there are no near term plans to implement one.
Because of the money aspect of steemit it is very likely that a standard referral reward system would be subject to gaming and exploitation. A referral system would have to be carefully crafted to avoid the obvious pitfalls.
Recruit a friend
In the meantime there is nothing to stop any of us recruiting friends, family, work colleagues etc.
I am sure this is how a lot of people got on to Facebook back in the golden, innocent days...
"Hey, you need to get on this great new social network Facebook. Everyone is joining it."
It was effective. People joined Facebook in massive numbers. And most stayed because their friends and family were there.
Steemit is different. Many, or even most, of us probably don't have any real life friends or family on steemit.
Reading a recent post by @stephenkendal, Stephen highlights that the join-up rate for steemit has begun to drop recently. He had set a target of 650,000 members on steemit by the end of the year. That is looking doubtful now.
There are 28,000 active users on steemit at present.
Imagine if just half of the active users managed to recruit one new member every fortnight until the end of the year. That would be another 100,000 members.
I've been on steemit for 100 days. I am now feeling confident enough about the platform to start showing it to friends and family. I know enough to demonstrate how steemit works and I have a bit of voting power to support new people I bring on with encouraging upvotes. I can mentor them and keep them going through the difficult first couple of months.
Some will already be recruiting their friends to steemit. Some will not want to as they like to keep their steemit life separate from their real life.
I suspect many would recruit if there was some incentive or financial reward to do so.
A 'built-in' referral reward system in steemit isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Perhaps some clever devs could build a 'referral reward app' that could do the job - but without the required access to the steemit signup process I can't see how that would be possible.
Maybe therefore the quickest and most practical option is to gamify the process with a contest.
How would the Recruit a Friend to Steemit contest work
Still a work in progress but this is how it could run :
- The contest would run monthly.
- There would be a monthly contest post. If you want to enter the contest that month you register your interest as a recruiter in the comments on that post.
- Once you have registered on that post you go out and encourage friends, family, work colleagues etc to sign up to steemit through the usual ways.
- When one of your recruits has been activated ask them to do an #introduceyourself post and include at the bottom the line "I was recruited to steemit by @yourname"
- At the end of the month there will be a monthly recruitment tally post. In that recruiters entering in the contest will need to post a comment listing all the new members they have recruitment during the month.
Prizes
There would be prizes for the people who have recruited the most new members in that month.
A big part of this recruitment method is that it should improve retention. So to encourage recruiters to help and mentor their recruitees there could be a follow up 3 months later with another prize for the recruiter who has the highest number of their recruitees still active.
Questions to answer
This whole process needs a lot of human glue to make it work, and it could be rather labour intensive if too many people entered. Therefore I would suggest making it country specific to start. That would keep the numbers manageable and would overcome potential language issues. If the contest model does work it could be replicated in any country.
There are still questions to answer about the concept :
- Would it be worthwhile?
- What would be the prizes? Who would provide them?
- Are there any obvious flaws, weaknesses or exploits in the system? If so, how can they be overcome?
- How could we stop recruiters 'buying' recruitees by persuading random new members to edit their intro posts to include their "I was recruited to steemit by @..." line ?
- Would too many people enter to make it unmanageable manually?
So that's my 100th day anniversary idea for helping to grow steemit.
If people think it a worthwhile idea, and if anyone can help with the prizes, I will be happy to run an initial trial contest to see how it goes.
Over to you my fellow steemit citizens...
If you found this post useful or interesting please do upvote, resteem and follow. Thank you.
You might also be interested in some of my other posts :
Calling Wales, Calling Wales - any steemit citizens from Wales or living in Wales?
SteemTowns - connecting the virtual with the reality - would it be possible?
[graphic by @pennsif]
I don't think recruiting is any problem, the main problem is how can I encourage the friends I brought in to be active.
In the past few days I invited my two brothers and two of my friends.
My brothers just joined and got back to their telegram, Instagram routine because their friends are there.
one of my friend joined and didn't save his keys, now he is locked out of his account and can't do anything. He just can't comprehend why can't he recover his password.
The other one seen that and just moved on.
I think the problem is the user layer of steemit is a bit too complicated for those who come from outside of crypto currency community. they don't understand the whole idea and the fear of doing something wrong and mess everything just freezes them in place.
Yup. It isn't the number, the quality of users.
Excellent points. I've had similar experiences with many of my friends that I have recruited. I've found that the ones that stick around are the ones who I constantly encourage and "hand-hold". Recruiting is a lot more than just getting them to sign up!
Yes mentoring and hand holding would be all important. To encourage this I would perhap make the bigger prizes kick in on the +3 months retention numbers. We don't just want zero-day signups we want long term active users.
The apparent complexity of steemit can be rather a shock to the system for anyone coming from one of the slick, well-oiled and simplified mainstream social platforms.
Anyone you bring to the platform does need a lot of handholding to keep them going.
I have introduced two people to steemit now. One is persevering and getting into it. The other has fallen off after a few posts and may be tricky to win back.
A full-on buddy or mentoring system might help with retention.
The no password-recovery bit of steemit is a particularly hard story to sell to a non-believer 😞
Great initiative!! Love this, the main problem here is once u have recruited how do u get the whales to up torte new members and the recruiters to reward them for joining? It needs to be focuses as much on letting the whales know about it as iris about recruiting new members. So u should develop this plan and start a promotion campaign within steemit to obtain the support of the ones with the steem power while simultaneously beginning the recruitment campaign
Unless steemit builds a full-on referral scheme into the core, which I suspect is very unlikely for the timebeing, some sort of jerry-rigged system like this will remain best-in-show.
I wonder whether the best way to refine this idea is to try it out for a month. Or has it got to many leaks and holes that it would be exploited to death on its first outing?
How do you catch a whale on a project like this?
This litterally needs one whale dedicated to upvoting people bringing new users in. It is probably worth trying some sort of trial for a month, but it will be very difficult to get many people using it, let alone get new recruits. I guess if you publicise this long enough and to the right people you can have a launch recruitment week where everyone starts recruiting together at the same time. thisway you may not have an immediate results, but will be able to build up to the big even on steemit. if that is successful, I am sure it will get significant traction then, and maybe even a modification built into the steemit interface in some way.
At the moment all i do is tell people i speak to that I will upvote them if they join and mention my name in their intro blog...
The referral reward is getting people who you get over to STEEMit to upvote your posts.
Exploits would be from people who have large YouTube followers and bring them over. So, no need. They will get their payouts from all the upvotes from their followers.
Yes YouTubers bringing followers would be an issue. Although they might not bother with this sort of contest approach unless the prizes were very large. As you say, they particularly would get their rewards from the upvotes of followers.
Also, we already have 1,000s of bots. I'm sure it would be hard to determine real accounts from bot accounts.
Unless and until it is easier to get folks signed up I don't see the massive amount of folks coming in from yt, no matter who the channel is.
Agreed. Sign up is an area that needs a bit of streamlining for mass adoption.
Bots are a problem. I fear steemit will be overrun by bots soon...
But the requirement for verified introduceyourself posts would help on this.
Then cheetah would have a fun time upvoting the bot introduce yourself posts, because they'll share the content of probably the same 5 posts.
Great Idea I think after a little bit more time with the platform I should know enough to at least market it to my friends. I see you mentioned mentoring I am still fairly new and not the most computer savvy so any tips are always appreciated. Thanks
Hi @isteemithard, thanks for your comment. It took me 3 months here to begin to understand the bigger picture. Still lots to learn of course. My tips... stick at it and keep networking.
Yeah I was thinking about this!
Maybe just rewarding with like 1SBD per refferal?
I don't think the reward could be that high.
Best case scenario I see is a post is created announcing the top people and the reward is split among them.
Unfortunately that would be exploited massively... and bankrupt whoever was funding it.
Yeah you guys are right, direct referral rewards would be too costly.
Either way people will always game the system so might as well make it as public and as automated as possible while limiting exploitation.
Process of Referring
Under our keys we should just be able to generate a referral link. Anyone who signs up using that gives us credit for them doing so if the following conditions are meet:
Rewards
A new account is created by Steemit Inc. and they put some some SP into that account. SP is then delegated from that account for 3 weeks towards the top recruiters. How many you recruited gets broken down into a % with a hard cap of 5% to be delegated toward those people. Max of 90% of SP from the account should be delegated at most.
A new tab is added that is called “referrals” or whatever that show who you sign up and when. Information should also be shown on the blockchain.
Monthly list is then put out of the top people and how much SP they are delegated for 3 weeks.
Anyone who gets caught cheating the system is then downvoted by the remaining unused SP from the Steemit Inc. account for two weeks. Your ability to create referral link is also disabled and can only be manually enabled by Steemit inc. if they feel it is warranted.
Issues
Now this does leave us with some issues. People exploiting the system for delegated SP and avoiding detection.
People abusing someone else’s referral link to get them downvoted and their referral ability revoked.
Time Steemit Inc. has to invest time: creating, maintaining, and dealing with removing people form the ban list.
Opt Out Option
For those who don’t want a referral link or wish to remove their referral link for whatever reason have the ability to disable it themselves.
This has the makings of a good solution, but will rely on development action from steemit inc, which I guess is unlikely for some time. The question is whether it is worth trying to come up with a manually administered scheme in the interim?
I’ve noticed certain people who have gained an influence outside of Steemit to bring people in have been given decent sizes delegation of SP. Not sure if it’s related to their recruiting efforts or something else. Maybe something is already being tested and worked on in the background.
The main issue is without Steemit Inc. we simply don’t have any tools to tell if someone is trying cheat with multiple accounts or not or what other ways people try and game a system like this.
I simply view it as to much work. Which is why I passed it off as an idea that if it looks good enough maybe others would come in and refine it down into something more simple and easier to admin.
Then there is the issue of having a fair share of SP to lessee out.
I have thought for a long time that a referral system would be a game changer for Steemit. I think the main concern though is that it could make it seem more like a scam/pyramid scheme. Also, people may do some not-100%-honest things to try and recruit, which could be bad for the platform. If we could find a way to work through those issues, I think it would be great!
Yes, steemit does seem to be attracting some very keen and clever scammers and exploiters.
Any referral scheme might need some more knowledgeable steemians than me to work through to ensure all the possible loopholes are locked down.