We regularly let readers share their referral links. The aim is to give readers that provide helpful comments and alert us of deals a way of getting some extra points/miles/cash back from other readers. For the most part it works well. I’ve been noticing a few issues recently and I thought I’d address them in the hopes of getting some feedback and possible way to combat these issues:
- A lot of people that either aren’t regular readers or aren’t active readers share their links. I try to encourage readers to use links from other readers that they recognize as providing useful content/comments but often people will just come across the first link they see.
- People lie, cheat & steal. Unfortunately some people take advantage of the fact we allow this type of referral sharing and will lie to try and get more sign ups (my link does ZYX when it doesn’t for example). We used to allow people to offer small rewards (like an extra Amazon gift card) for using their link but it ended up with people just yelling at each other and lies all over the place so we had to discontinue that.
- Posting multiple links. A lot of people will post their link multiple times, it’s usually fairly obvious but sometimes they go to great lengths to hide this fact.
- It’s time consuming to moderate. It takes time to enforce the rules we try to put in place, find comments in spam and a variety of other issues.
Ideally we’d have a more robust commenting system where you can tag users that provide helpful comments (that way you can find their referral links later) but realistically that isn’t something we’re going to add in the short term if at all. I’m not sure if I’m just venting or looking for a possible solution.
Readers sharing and using each other’s referral links is a good thing, don’t ruin it by being greedy.
Venture X 90k referral link
https://i.capitalone.com/JnQqwrEsi
I’m new to this app still learning any help is welcome
need capital one link any1?
Hey DoC, Always enjoy your posts! I am more a regular reader, rather than an active commenter. I like the idea of a password protected post. Though I am not an active commenter, I do tend to use referral links that other DoC readers post. I hope this practice continues. I have benefitted, and I hope I helped others too by using their links.
just caught up on a weeks worth of posts, and now I see what generated this post. lol
🙂
to solve the password issue, a mod can move all comments into the actual post. and then lock it from comments
I created rankt.com for /r/churning if you seriously want to have some type of third party help with your referral system. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing it for more than just that sub. If it’s something you wish to explore feel free to ping me on reddit, /u/zackiv31
Thanks Zach, not exactly sure how such a system would realistically work with a blog. Any ideas?
Ideally you would need a way to filter out the hit and run types. Who don’t contribute and just want to post links. /r/churning does that through karma.
Do you have a way to associate frequent posters from those who just showup once? I know we don’t login here, but we do enter an email address.
As far as integrating, it could work like /r/churning, in that it scrapes your site for referral links and presents them on rankt in a randomized fashion. If your blog has a way to hide comments on specific posts, you could allow submission on referral pages, but only viewing on rankt. That way you could police comments here, and only those you deem “good” would make it through to rankt for the community to share.
That doesn’t solve all of the problems, but it solves some of them. If you can somehow determine the “good” posters vs the “bad” ones, that’s most of what you would need in order to take advantage of rankt.
I provided my Discover referral here with additional compensation offer and I think my users can attest that I kept my end of the bargain and I quickly maxed out for the year. Is this no longer allowed in future? I think it went very well.
In my opinion leave it the way it is and not make things complicated for anyone (DoC included).
I had my referral link used only once in my lifetime few days ago for SPG card.
Maybe all the stars in the universe aligned in order for that to happen 🙂
Ideally there should be a script which randomly posts only one link every day.
I think people select randomly anyway.
I say we get rid of the referrals. Whenever you post a referral thread, there’s a good chance the first poster will get most of them, which is why people reply to the first referral, then people reply to that, etc. People’s referrals in the middle rarely even get seen. I know I’ve never gotten any referrals from any of the links I’ve posted here and it’s just been a huge waste of my time.
Unless you have a good way to randomize it, it just seems unfair that the person who happened to be browsing at the time you post gets the majority of the referrals.
Your comments are the biggest problems with the referrals. I was surprised when this wasn’t mentioned as one of the bullet points in the post.
A randomizer would be awesome. Not sure how we’d be able to do that, though.
Yeah, I definitely plan to ban replies to comments as that doesn’t seem fair.