A Radical Idea for a New Payment Method on Medium
Scammers and bots would be left biting their own dust
Hi, I just had an idea about a radical new way to pay us disgruntled writers.
It would keep us happy, and bots and scammers would be defeated:
Only paying members can clap a story, and each clap they make gives the writer a penny.
Paid-up members can give up to $5.00 worth of claps per month, and maximum .50c per story.
Though Medium would probably reduce our clap budget to $4.00’s worth, so they can make a profit.
And FOM’s would have three times as much to spend in claps per month. So FOM’s could give 50c to 24 stories per month.
In a nutshell, paying members have an automatic tipping pot of X dollars, to directly reward writers’ stories that they read.
We’d have full transparency: Only paying-members can clap, each clap is a penny (1c =1 clap) so we know what each story has earned.
No more complicated member read-time/ engagement calculations, and no more baffling stats, or powerless suspicions of being conned out of our deserved payments.
We could have a running balance of our tipping pot.
Non-paying members can comment but not clap.
No more pay walls. Just automatic payments straight from member writer/reader to writer.
We’re grown-ups, we can spend our money however we bloody like!
No pay walls, Medium is happy. No need to contort reality with double-speak of echo chambers and specious logic: Pay by clap, and no-one needs to care about clap-and-runners, percentage rates, or non-member reads bringing your earnings down — all because Medium’s payment system is so complicated, hackable and exploitable.
Pay-per-clap, and maybe Medium could sweeten it by giving a bonus when a story gets 100 clappers. There’s bound to be unspent claps at the end of the month, so to speak.
Where is the incentive for bots and scammers to pay sub money and then spend $4.00 out of their $5 dollar sub-per-month by clapping themselves?
They might lure people to read their story but if no-one claps their crappy AI written stories, they earn nothing.
A wise woman once said:
“Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves.”
If ten members clap ten times each, you’d get a dollar.
You can clap ten times on 40 stories every month, or clap once on 400 stories a month ( who reads 400 stories a month?). I’d be happy to give and to earn 7 cents from one read, wouldn’t you? 10c for a read, very nice, and 50 cent, woo hoo!
