Foiling Clap Arbitrage on Medium

Valerie Kittell
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read
Source

This article was inspired by a comment in this great article by Iva Ursano (who has no idea of who I am or why I am citing her)

But she did mention something that made the hair on my neck stand up:

I got hit with spam here on one of my posts. Some guy was advertising buying claps or likes or something to that effect and my first thought was “oh no, not here too!!!”.

The Medium Partner Program gave amateur or, more flatteringly , independent writers the ability to earn money from their unique stories, articles, and thoughts which I think is the greatest thing that has ever happened in the History of Blogging. Kudos to Medium and its creators/visionaries — I think you may rule the world and the internet in the future. (More on that later)

But, once money is involved, the table is set for potential miscreants to eye the buffet. Why am I going here? Because there is precedent if you have followed how bad actors/authors corrupt and increase their payouts on other platforms basically by figuring out how to purchase the currency required for payout with a margin for profit.

Here’s how I see this potential problem/issue:

CHALLENGE

Claps = Payout on Medium if a post is monetized (C=P)

IF C=P than it stands to reason that obtaining C will become a priority for anyone who desires P.

I don’t think one has to be a genius to immediately realize that the evil geniuses among us will be focusing all their little grey matter on figuring out how to collect claps that translate into payout. I personally can already think of a couple of ways, which I won’t go into so as not to lay out a roadmap for Bad Guys.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION (a)

The good news is that every single bad way I can think of to cheat my way to P through C can be headed off at the pass with TRANSPARENCY and one simple rule :

P(ayout)s = S(ubscription)- M(edium cut) and is always < CoC(Cost of Claps)

What this means (and this is the really important point) that buying a membership for someone to clap for you will never ever be profitable, because a 20% percent loss is built into the membership.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION (b)

I think Medium should publish openly their exchange rate — as an example, a paid $5.00 monthly membership will translate into 500 claps per month. I would take a cut as the intermediary if I was Medium, say 20%, leaving the member with 400 claps to award. This would allow everyone to know with every post in real time what the claps translate into — Oh, I have 63 claps and that would be $0.125 x 63= $.78 (rounded down)

I would also allow any members who chose to, to refill their clap allowance — give Medium $5.00 more dollars and have 500 (really 400) more claps to bestow. This would make Medium more like Patreon where one could be more or less generous as one chose, to the benefit of the author/writer/producers one particularly wants to support.

So, what do you think? Am I addressing a problem that doesn’t exist? One that might exist in the future? Or one that can’t and won’t exist due to already existent controls?

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