Barriers To Payment

“Let me say one more time: Medium is not a marketplace.”

“I am strangely gratified if someone finds some value in the random crap that I say online. It’s perfectly wonderful for me if they find it so valuable that they hunt down my email address and PayPal a few bucks to my pocket once or twice a year — but I have no expectation of it.”

Clearly you acknowledge that people can pay you for your work. Yet, over and over you assert that Medium is not, and should not be, a market.

Let’s say that you’re in a part of town that happens to have a ton of street performers. They all have a hat, or something similar, that you have the option of putting money into. Would you consider this part of town to be a market?

What if, before you put any money into a hat, you were required to do 20 pushups. Would you consider this part of town to be more, or less, a market? What if, before you put any money into a hat, you were required to name all the presidents in the correct order while doing and maintaining a handstand? Would you consider this part of town to be more, or less, a market?

In my most popular story on Medium I shared this screenshot of how Medium might look if the barrier to payment was a lot smaller…

You’d have the option to click a coin button. If you did so, then the money would be automatically and instantly withdrawn from your digital wallet and deposited into my own.

If Medium’s barrier to payment was this low… then would you consider Medium to be a marketplace?