Why PTCing is a sham

Consider this post not here. Nah, just kidding. This blog isn't exactly dead, but I've absolutely lost my enthusiasm for talking about PTCs, except, of course, if it involves PTC bashing. Which is what this post is about.

ebele tells me she doesn't understand how getting direct referrals is giving someone else the short end of the stick. I posted my answer to the comments section of the last post, and thought it worthy of its own post:
Simply put: Would you, if you had no direct or rented referrals, stay in the PTC you would be collecting direct referrals in? If the answer is no, then what about the people who are without direct referrals, as you get further and further down the line of direct referrals? Eventually, you'll either find someone who doesn't care, and so the whole thing unravels, or who can't get referrals, and so the whole thing unravels. Because, would you stay in if you couldn't get any referrals? If not...
This problem was quintessential with GDI (Global Domains International). It's less evident with PTCs.

How does it unravel? Well, if the person above you is in the PTC business because there are referrals clicking for her and making her money, and the person above that person is doing it for the same reasons, and the person above that person, likewise, and so on and so forth for a good number of people, if the people who are under one of them, way down the line, stops clicking out of boredom (let's just consider that to be not the case for this scenario), or stops clicking because the specific PTC has reached saturation point (everyone's heard about it and everyone's in it), then what about the person who got this last person in as a referral? The person starts losing her direct referrals, which was a good deal of the motivation for clicking (the difference between $30 per month and $1 per month), and so she stops clicking. Oh boy, and what about the person above her? And the person above her? The person above the person that's above her?

You end up with the domino effect, starting from the direct referrals that were at the end of the saturation, and leading up to the very first people who got into the PTC business with this particular PTC.

Supposedly, renting referrals helps with this (so you have more equality in the situation). And, perhaps, it is, if you get one of the packages that cost $90+. And I might try it out just to see if it makes PTCing any less of a sham. But I thought the idea was to not spend money on PTCs? Well, it's not like it would be any worse than $200+ on bux.to... *shrugs*