Smash that clap button

Medium’s decided it wants to pay writers with the digital equivalent of a clap-o-meter. Some company staffers, in a blog post announcing the change:
Essentially, we look at the engagement of each individual member (claps being the primary signal) and allocate their monthly subscription fee based on that engagement. This is one of the reasons we love Claps — it helps us measure the depth of appreciation that a member has for each individual post.
Medium has taken the meaninglessness of all online metrics to its logical next step: turning internet points into real dollars at an unknowable conversion rate. They’re asking you, the writer who’s invested in this platform, to spin the wheel and hope that your audience keeps smashing that clap button, and will continue to do so month after month.
In this system, my pay as a writer depends on everyone else doing a worse job than me at attracting one specific kind of attention. Is 5,000 claps a lot? Not if they’re all from one person who goes and gives the next story she reads 50,000. It’s in my best interest to monopolize an audience, making the entire process less and less worthwhile for everyone else. That’s a terrible incentive to introduce to a closed ecosystem that requires a broad contributor base to thrive.
The move also assumes that readers will treat such a light metric rationally. It removes Medium’s responsibility for figuring out writers’ compensation, but it also doesn’t put that ability totally in the hands of subscribers. Unless a reader tracks how they’ve divided their claps throughout the month, nobody will know how pay shakes out until after it happens.
All that said, Medium is still one of the best places to independently publish writing online: It’s intuitive, it looks great and it has a built-in network. The company’s struggled to find a revenue model from the beginning, but if it can figure out how to make money without a scale-based advertising play, it’ll be ahead of most of the digital media companies. Maybe that looks like some sort of tip jar that pulls from a balance tied to subscribers’ accounts, or a way to set up direct, consistent payments to writers. The system needs fine tuning, but Medium’s experimentation is a good mindset to start from.
