Claps are nice, but why the one-size-fits-all membership fee of $5 per month???
Different members get different value, and have different willingness and ability to pay (and that can vary from month to month). The membership price should be variable, and members should have some say in what it should be. My recent post, The Missing Piece of the Membership Puzzle — Agreeing on Value for Each Member, explains why .
Claps may be a useful metric for apportioning value to pay out across the content base, but how do you determine the total value that should be paid in (for a given month from a given member)? If you are being adaptive about one, why not the other?
As a lesser point (touched on in my post) many membership publications (the Guardian, WikiTribune, De Correspondent) are going with voluntary membership fees, to maximize the total distributed value of their content. The strategies I propose enable publishers to nudge members to pay at fair levels, whether that is with strict criteria for minimum fairness, or just voluntary, with soft nudging. It seems voluntary with soft nudging might be preferable for Medium. However, you might have premium membership tiers that require fairness/generosity minimums — and you might then let authors select whether they want their stories to be restricted to premium members (and see what works through careful testing).
