Suggestion: Bonus Curation Rewards For Onboarding New Users to Steem
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
Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Hey @omeratagun, I just gave you a tip for your hard work on moderation. Upvote this comment to support the utopian moderators and increase your future rewards!
This seems like a cool idea, and would def be beneficial for me lol I have a wide reach outside of steemit (which is currently being killed by algorithms) and it has been hard to transfer that crowd over to steemit, where I hope to be building a future.
Things have been much better for me here since I learned discord and found some friends, but having the abilty to benefit from bringing people here would be awesome.
If this were to happen though, we need to do something about the registration process. Many times when i try to get people over they complain about the registration process and have problems getting accepted.
Absolutely, yes - the signup process must be fixed before we can see any significant growth. I highlighted this nearly a year ago and it STILL isn't fixed.. It's quite mind blowing and even caused me to speculate that there might be financial incentive for the relevant people in NOT fixing it.
I use Busy.org because if the extra =upvote I get and they have this integrated into their system.
Oh ok, I didn't know about that - does the bonus only apply to posts made through busy?
Hmm not sure but all the people i invited i make sure they use busy to get that one vote a day.
Currently i get a .06% upVote from busy which translates to about .16 cents a day do at least I don't need to worry that I get a 0 pay out for my posts hahha
A 10% referral bonus of the earnings they have for 30 days would not be bad especially if they get curied, utopian , OCD or SteemSTEM during that first month.
You are also incentivized to help them in that critical first month thus increasing the chances to be retained in the platform.
Yes, ok - I think this is such a useful concept that it would be good to add to Steem at the blockchain level.
I am so glad that you've accepted my suggestion boss.
Can I join the utopian community and work alongside with you?
You're definitely gonna enjoy my Ideas
Sure, yes - anyone can create an account on https://utopian.io using their existing steem logins. You can get help from the utopian team via their Discord channels and also learn more about the system on their site. :)
Thank you very much sir. I'm gonna do my best to help promote steemit to it's apogee
I'm not a fan of reducing curation rewards at all, in fact I'd like to see them back to their original 50:50 split, as an effort to keep people gambling their voting power on quality articles, instead of self/circle voting.
If they have to choose between a self upvote, and a small chance at a small portion of a small percentage of somebody else's payout; they're just going to self upvote.
The balance needs to be found, for sure. I have not done the maths to know exactly what percentage would be ideal. Perhaps a dynamic solution might work best whereby the kind of stats I produce on steem ocean are used to set the system wide split between curation and author rewards depending on the system wide level of self upvoting and curation payouts.
Something like that might work well, but would probably require a very thorough math analysis to determine it's correct design.
In any case, the suggestion here is not so much to reduce curation rewards, as it is to simply redirect them temporarily towards the user that onboards the new account. Since anyone can onboard new accounts, those who would look to abuse the rewards pool would at least instead have a new avenue of getting paid, which is to bring in new users.
That's still reducing the amount available to upvoters, though (assuming I'm reading this correctly).
As it stands, as an upvoter, my only really lucrative window is to upvote a post that's more than 30 mins old, hasn't had anyone upvote it yet, and will go on to be popular.
The only positive, is that if all the stars align, and all of those factors appear at once, I'll get a big chunk of 25% of the payout figure. This suggestion would reduce that percentage further.
Would upvoters have some way to know which posts offered smaller curation rewards?
The amount available to upvoters would be reduced temporarily for the relevant posts, yes. However, a period of a few weeks (perhaps a month) is a relatively short time in the lifetime of a user's activity on a social network and on balance I think the increased userbase should offer a greater benefit to users than they stand to lose by a temporary reduction in the ability to earn through curation on certain posts.
The main point for me here is that the new user might receive less votes if greedy voters know that some percent will be going to a referrer. I actually don't vote with the hope of getting curation rewards, I vote to reward good posts and view the curation rewards as a bonus - so personally I don't really care much about maybe not quite getting as much curation rewards as I would otherwise, if the result is many more users and investors in Steem.
Of course, but then we're in 'Tragedy of the commons' territory.
Everyone benefits every time somebody upvotes a quality article, but each individual is best served by upvoting themselves.
It's already a massive problem, and I can only see this making it worse, tbh.
You upvote quality and I upvote me, I get the best of both worlds and you get the worst of both.
The suggestion here does not negate or end the benefit of upvoting quality articles - if anything it is intended to increase the range of potentially quality articles to vote for in the future, plus also potentially also increase the overall payouts due to increased valuation of the Steem tokens.
In any case, nothing that I have suggested here stops the ratio of author to curator payout being changed independently.
Wow, you come with great and innovative idea because referral programs are really effective and in my opinion once this referral program is launched then the promotion of Steemit can rise with rapid rate and in turn it will boost the Steemit Platform. Thanks for sharing and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂
@ura-soul, great idea and wonderful suggestion, It is really helpful for the promotion and development of Steemit. I am hopeful that the management of Steemit take a look on this and also hope that Sir @ned approved this. Good work friend I appreciated your positive approach.
I like this. I would also like to have a method to penalize users who on-board spammers and bots. i.e. Using the blockchain, we should be able to see who sponsored who. If that sponsor is responsible for onboarding fake users, the sponsor should get downvoted.
This would add accountability to those who are onboarding.
I usually don't advocate for 'punishments' since they tend to be able to be worked around and ultimately can even be used as a weapon - for example, If I don't like someone, I can just create some accounts and use that person's username in the referral field.. then abuse the blockchain using the new accounts and the person I don't like will be punished. Anything that can be used as a weapon must be viewed with that in mind.
Great idea! I propose changing the full curation bonus to a so-called 'delayed' full curation bonus . After 3 months of the referred user signup, a full curation bonus from his/her posts for a specific time period (perhaps 4 weeks) could be activated. This is because after signup most users stay minnows, struggling to become dolphins. But after 3 months, good quality providers become minimum dolphins. This way the referring users are motivated to bring valuable bloggers.
I am speaking from experience: when I saw that at busy.org I got 10% of my referrals rewards, I was excited. Then I saw that was valid only for the first 30 days....and ahhhh ...what a minnow could do in 30 days...
Thanks for the suggestion - personally I feel that the system is already a bit over complicated for many people to want to use it (or understand it), so I would avoid any solution that adds complication that could be avoided. To accommodate your point about users typically not getting high rewards right away, my suggestion is to just extend the bonus time period to 3 months. That way, if I bring in a really high earning user, then I also get greatly rewarded, plus if I bring in low earning users, I will at least get something once they have settled in.
About the system being too complicated, as a minnow, couldn't agree more. :-)Regarding the extension of the bonus period to 3 months, that would be a good solution. Not too short(1 month), not too long (6 months +).This way we could avoid the MLM tendencies, but also the referrer has a chance to acquire some real earnings.
That's good idea.