Greg Ferenstein
Aug 23, 2017 · 1 min read

As someone who used to get paid to drive traffic volume to newsrooms, I know that a lot of click-bait stories are well recieved by the audience. Its a lot of mob pandering and outrage stoking. As we speak, I have a contentious, long-read story on Medium thats about to cross 500K reads; it took me 4 months to write.

I have another story that was (admittedly) written in outrage that crossed 1M reads and has more claps and took 2 hours to write.

Now, the former is the kind of indepth analysis that needs subscribers and a community. the latter is more suited to clap-based payment because its easy to get lots of strangers to these stories who have a fleeting interest in a microphone for their pre-existing beliefs.

If someone told me that my rent check depended on claps, id do the kind of writing that Medium hopes to avoid.

I say this with a sense of humility, because im continually impressed with your thinking Ev Williams and i dont want to be critical of something that will prove itself out. But, speaking as a professional writer, this wouldnt incentivize me for the better.

I remain optimistic that medium will come up with something that fixes this.

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    Greg Ferenstein

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    Writer. Researcher. Educator. Policy Wonk. Optimist.