Are there examples of pyramid-scheme-like practices that are legal?

Question

My question is about how things related to pyramid schemes can actually be strategic and ethical, and not scams.

Pyramid schemes have general characteristics related to:

• leveraging personal networks to share information instead of a single information source exposed to a single group of people (like an ad). In other words, it’s recursive, in that participants bring in participants who bring in participants. Also, the standard way to get information out these days seems to be ads, but in a way ads are kind of a complicated matter and there’s no really standard way to run them, there are many options. Trying to accomplish some kind of goal strictly via person-to-person (“word of mouth”, but intentional and organized) communication in a way is more direct - people are the endgoal of ads anyway, but in this case, people are both the recipients of a message and the medium of transmission. I find it much purer, in a way.
• Similar to what I said above, it is based on human networks, so this can be compared to elements of social networks, the potential speed by which something can travel through them because humans are so highly interconnected
• It can grow exponentially because if each participant achieves whatever is to be achieved with at least more than one person, there is very little work per individual yet it can still reach huge numbers of people
• They incentivize participants to also benefit from the organization’s operations, so in a way every member has a dual function - they both give in the one direction, receive from the other. Therefore, you potentially fuse the concept of customer and employee. The members feel the organization benefits them, and so they also support and work for the organization. Plus, there are natural, self-regulating incentives to do something (sort of like aspects of blockchain).

I am not talking about pyramid scheme’s cousin multi-marketing schemes. I mean positive examples of anything of the above, and which are also totally legal. Perhaps certain business practices which have some degree of recursion; incentivizing actors to perform a function in a semi-voluntary way rather than mandated as part of a job; or possibly highly reciprocal relationships between organization and employee where the employees don’t just serve a higher authority but actually feel directly compelled to benefit it because there’s a direct incentive in it for them (sort of like getting a commission on sales).

Off the top of my head, the only good example of something actually useful is that I heard sometimes journalists need to find very specific people in a new area and the only way is via “networking”, but recursively - getting contacts, then asking them for their contacts, and so on.

This brings me to the final form of this question: pyramid schemes are illegal, but what specifically about them are the illegal parts? In business or otherwise, are “recursive incentive structures” illegal in general? I think I remember in middle school there might have been some fundraising thing where you try to sell magazine subscriptions but maybe you can also sign someone up to sell magazine subscriptions themselves. I guess that’s sort of like the Girl Scouts, they sell cookies but also recruit at the same time? Also, it’s really common for apps to offer a cash bonus if you recommend the app to a friend. I am pretty sure that meets the exact definition of a pyramid scheme if they just added in that you get a bonus for every person you sign up, and for every person those people sign up too. Is that true? Do standard referral promos become instantly illegal the moment they ask the referrers to refer to more than one person, for example?

Is there any example of an illegal pyramid scheme that did not have to do with money, but some other kind of incentive, either merely some kind of good or product; or points or status in an organization? Or is this legal as long as there is no exchange of a currency?