Referrals are a really slippery slope, in my opinion. The problem being that they typically attract completely the wrong of person... I have seen that happen to most failed platforms focused on user-generated content. As @krnel has said in a number of his posts and comments, it turns it into a short term "lottery reward" system with zero lasting value.

For one, presenting Steemit as "a place to make money" is a total disaster. As I have written elsewhere, it unleashes a swarm of "get paid to click buttons" locusts who only care for milking the host site of every penny they can-- by honest AND dishonest means-- and they don't care about quality, sustainability, the long term or anything else.

If Steemit is to be marketed, it must be as a really cool, censorship-free, peer-curated CONTENT site, where rewards are just a nice fringe benefit.

A referral system-- if ANY-- could be used primarily to track "associations." If I write an article about "why I am no longer on Facebook, because Steemit is cooler" it would be nice if people who become members as a result are automatically connected to me, so I would at least be following them, so I could see their content and encourage them to become active. That's cool.

The rewards part? I could MAYBE go for a 1% referral to the referrer ONCE the person you referred (for example) reached 1000SP. That way there's ZERO incentive for referring inactive people... and more incentive for "hand picking" people who feel would be active participants and valuable to the community.