What is Wrong with Clapping

As you all know, Medium introduced a new thingy: clapping.

As always, there are mixed reactions to this. Some people loved it, some people hated it. I will try to establish where I stand very briefly.

Before clapping we had recommendations. When I heard about clapping, I was filled up with anticipation. Because I thought that the clapping and recommendations will live together. But clapping just overwritten recommendations. Now, I can’t recommend anything via Medium. Now I have to go to My Social Media of Choice to “recommend” something. If I clap something, it just means I liked that thing — not necessarily an endorsement.

And this shows in the “You might like” section. Before clapping, whatever I see in that section was much more to my taste. Now — not exactly.

I can see why Medium rolled out clapping though. They want a way to see how much they pay to an author. But I think they chose the easy way out. They just delegated their work to us. Because…

Well, because now people are getting paid by the “clap”s they get. If I read something and don’t clap it, the writer does not get paid (from me, that is). But I read his piece. It did the “job” for me — because I come here to read something, whatever I like this or not is not exactly relevant. As long as I know that I can find something to read here, I will come back.

Imagine now a book or a newspaper or a magazine. When you buy a book, you pay. When you buy a newspaper, you pay. When you buy a magazine, you pay. You pay for reading — period. You may not like that book, you may not like the news in the paper, you may not like the content of the magazine. But it did its job.

As the piece, I didn’t clap or recommend did the job for me. But still, the guy didn’t get paid. So imagine this ten-fold, thousand-fold, million-fold. Nobody like the piece. But does that make that piece worse than the other stuff? I am not sure. But if you are trying to get paid for what you write, then you have only one option on Medium: you have to be a trick-horse. You have to write for claps. Because only then you will be able to make money off your writing.

I am not saying that we don’t need claps, or I don’t like claps. But in my honest opinion, we need a better metric to pay the writers. The Medium should get its act together and understand what is the “job” it does for its users. And also we need our recommendations for better communication.

And please, if you like this piece, instead of clapping, recommend it on your channels.

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Gökçe Ozan Toptaş

Written by

Communications @ WFP Turkey. Passionate about comms, marketing and all things strategy. Opinions are my own.

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