Now don't get me wrong, I realize some of you don't like referral links and that's quite understandable considering the history of the internet of scams, MLM's, all relying on the greed of many being the recruiters to trick people into buying into stuff. Unfortunately the same goes for most of the crypto projects as well, but hopefully over time that will improve too (although doubtful :p). 

On Hive though, no one's really forcing anyone to "pay up" to participate, store their content immutably and maybe even earn some cryto along the way. So if you ignore referral links cause of the stigma behind it that you think the person you're trying to onboard it is going to shy away due to the link then that's okay, but if you're doing it just because of your own issue with them then I wanted to create this post to maybe change your mind about why they're important and help some of our retention and curation initiatives. Maybe you could even explain to the person that you're onboarding a little bit about Hive and how at no point are they going to be forced to buy stake to participate in the ecosystem, just that it's a big bonus for them to do so if they want a jumpstart in growing their stake in our decentralized world. 

https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/06/05/11/01/airport-2373727_960_720.jpg

[Pixabae](https://pixabay.com/photos/airport-woman-flight-boarding-2373727/)

We have the @lovesniper initiative which is quite simply coded but does a lot for retention in my opinion. All it does, (and this part is also open-source created by @rishi556 so it can be shared for other communities to use it if they're interested), is notify us in Discord when an account makes its first post. It shares who that account was created by (@ocdb for instance), what kind of tags that first post has, username and title and a link to it and most importantly who the onboarder was/who's referral link was used.* 

Here's how we use this simple tool to curate and help guide users towards communities. 

We have curators take turns to open these links up, if it's some simple testing posts/short posts we recommend them that creating an intro post letting us know about their interests would be nice so we could better direct them towards communities they may be interested in. If it's an intro post then we read the gist of it and recommend some communities where they may want to post their next post into and connect with the people who actively run it. We also always ask how they found out about hive/who onboarded them. This is kind of important cause currently we don't have any active marketing so it's always interesting to find out "what's been working" and most of the time it is word of mouth from other Hive stakeholders, but some times it's also scams/fake ID/etc so we have to be careful with what posts we curate and often we may not even curate posts even if they look legit. Instead we then also follow accounts that we feel are genuine/have shown signs of being legit users. 

This then opens up another initiative for us which is curating lovesniper's [Following list](https://peakd.com/@lovesniper/feed) which anyone can view of any account on hive by simple typing @username/feed after the front-end link. On @peakd you can also add filters to exclude reblogs of the accounts Lovesniper follows which makes it easier to scour through all users it's following to make sure you don't miss any posts.


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/acidyo/23tki4DH2sKaMWuw5WgRa3wuzBP7MckZvEaUodeU6MfNFvvpRTocJTy2N5oby8WY9UZTh.png)

As you can see there's quite a lot of curation demand there but it doesn't mean that these posts are void from abuse/plagiarism so curate at your own discretion. We always try to get through these and have a handful of curators checking the feed a few times per day but we of course always welcome curation from the community or if anything engagement, followings, etc. Then once the accounts we're following reach a higher reputation we expect that at this point they're aware of communities and other crucial things Hive so we unfollow them to make room for other newcomers in our "lovesniper pool" which currently consists of 9277 accounts.

Going back to the question of the title. *When you onboard someone using the referral link it'll leave a "trace" if you will, on the new accounts showing us that this user was onboarded by you or at the very least that this user used your referral account. This is important to know cause we've had cases where someone for instance would use my referral link of @peakd or hiveonboard (both use hiveonboard & ocdb's account credits) but I personally  had no idea who this was as I hadn't directly onboarded them and then they were found out to plagiarise and people pointed their fingers at me. 

So this brings another important point to the onboarding, stay active with who you're onboarding. Peakd and Hiveonboard usually send you a memo letting you know of the new user that was onbaorded using your link so you can follow them and maybe delegate some RC towards them and when they make their first post it would help the @lovesniper initiative and probably a lot of other stakeholders if you either curated or left a comment towards the post and most importantly had a good reputation as a Hive user. This goes a long way as a "vouch" towards our curators that the post they're reading of this user that was onboarded is most likely legit and that the chances of there being plagiarism is smaller. 

So this is basically a reason to use your referral links when onboarding people to Hive. The rewards are of course not a lot and the beneficiary settings can be removed by the owner of the account at any time which is how it should be but at the same time these users wouldn't have received any rewards had they not found out and given hive a try if it wasn't for you. It's a nice balance between alright well as a start I guess my referrer can get some of my rewards but eventually I'm going to remove it which we're also fine with it working that way. 

One last thing I wanted to mention about onboarding is that we have a dedicated onboarding program in [our Discord server](https://discord.gg/nVh8EaRyJw) where you can apply as an onboarder and there your reputation and activity on Hive matters a lot as well. Compared to the method mentioned above, though, our links are different and unique, can only be used 1 time so it's more for direct 1on1 onboarding. We then also offer a lot more perks and rewards such as post rewards from @ocdb compilation posts, delegations from @ocd-witness and curation of your posts if you're and underrewarded author on Hive. This so you can spend more time focusing on onboarding, curating your onboarded users through us and making sure no abuse/plagiarism is occurring. We've had quite a few users join, some stay for a while but go idle but many sticking to it and onboarding quite a lot of people to Hive who are still very active today which is nice to see: 


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/acidyo/23tGVvH1BYpaajoNRPkm8ozab69X37ERQdzwYhGhtWons9GTFGNcZJSqbTQvC1QhNHF42.png)

The amount and retention stats have been quite decent and the way we have it built up is quite scalable so we're always looking for new interested onboarders to apply and hopefully be invited to test it out! But also for those not in our onboarding program we're always trying to make sure we're curating your onboarded users and helping with retention. 

Thanks for reading, onboarding, curating and being social users on Hive which has helped the platform remain very active during these markets and in my opinion very bullish for the near future.  

https://images.hive.blog/0x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/acidyo/23xKmtx2stpKP9Z7FKWJm6oDohuHxVtHKHQCUx6Fs8rDT65jB1FfvZ1xKByyeb3N1874c.png