Slashdot Mirror
Medium Will Now Pay Writers Based On How Many 'Claps' They Get (theverge.com)
Medium is getting creative with how they're paying its writers. The San Francisco-based online publishing platform will determine how much an author is paid by how many claps a story receives. Claps are basically Medium's equivalent of a Like, and they recently replaced the "recommend" feature -- a little heart button at the end of each article. The Verge reports: The site wants people to send authors claps to show how much they enjoy reading each article. Now, those claps are actually going to mean something. Medium pays authors by dividing up every individual subscriber's fee between the different articles they've read that month. But rather than doing an even division between articles, Medium will weight payments toward whichever articles a subscriber gives the most claps to. It's not clear exactly how much each individual clap tips the scale, but you can be sure that writers will be asking readers to click that button. It's a pretty strange way to implement payments, since it relies on a really arbitrary metric that individual subscribers might use in really different and inconsistent ways. Time spent on page and whether someone shared an article probably would have been useful metrics by which to tell how much a reader enjoyed a piece, but maybe that makes too much sense for a startup in the middle of its second business model pivot. On the positive side, claps can help Medium surface content that people are enjoying and get it in front of more readers.
Who else bets that the frothing-at-the-mouth angry SJW articles (and their right-wing equivalents, I guess) will always get a ton of claps? (Claps? chlamydias? kek!)
This is a good way to marginalize reasonable authors that tell the difficult truths, and pander to the lowest common mob drone from your favourite group of idiots.
It's a newspaper in San Francisco for the LGBTQ2SN community. So it's appropriate that writers get paid based on how many of their readers get the clap.
And I for one am excited to see where this takes us.
So whoever writes the most drivel that gets the most Facebook postings to drive more people to the site gets all the money each month. A writer could even pay people's subscriptions for a few months, since most of it would come back to them as payment. After building up a small following, they could just keep writing the same drivel and get the same claps, without having to payout the seed money anymore.
It's like a multi-player computer game I played once, based on a small business model. The person who sunk all their money into Research and Development at the start had the most money each round, and then just before the end they sunk all their money into Advertising, and had all the money at the end. After seeing that, that was the only way to play the game if you wanted to win.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
"2SN"? What's this latest addition to the freak show?
LBGTQ2SN? What repressed deviant group is the "N" for?
An anonymous bot service that provides automated "claps" for writers to get paid on articles.
... bots.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
And of those, how many care?
I care. I am going to sign up as a writer, whip up a Selenium script to "clap" my articles, and then write myself a minivan. If that doesn't work, I will hire clappers on Mechanical Turk.
If this online journal, magazine or news site is paid from ad views, then the fair way to do this is to share a portion of the ad revenue with the authors by views. By instituting a requirement for the viewer to 'clap' the article, they have another opportunity to get paid for an article and ad viewed, but not pay the writers.
For a while, not so long ago, one of their bloggers would submitl every post from their blog as a proposed Slashdot story. I got really tired of seeing medium.com all over the firehose (and even on the main page).
#DeleteChrome
They're basically trying to follow the Buzzfeed business model. Paying attention to online business models has value.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The N word you xenophobic monster!
It's customary to add a letter at random. So every time you use the acronym, add one more letter over the last time you used it. Otherwise I'd have to complain to the GP about lack of "A" and "I" and a few others in there, that insensitive clod.
That is "2SN!!!!111ONE!!!!1!" you insensitive clod!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
He also avoid claps by being a terrible writer.
I may be a terrible writer but at least I make money at being a terrible writer. I wouldn't make money with Medium. If I want to give my work away for free, I would publish at Fictionaut.
dunno but they are sure to get lots of trollish "EVERYONE MUST READ THIS AND SHARE!!!" and cutesy cat stuff articles from now on..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I prefer "GayBLT".
What's the chance the payouts will be determined in a fair, transparent, non-partisan manner?
What's the chance this is just a way for the VC cabal who own Medium to crowdsource some hysterical anti-worker propaganda?
Appropriately, I've misread a sentence in the summary as "Claps are basically Medium's equivalent of lice". Maybe they should have gone for jazz hands?
Ezekiel 23:20
It's not like pay-per-click or 'like' or whatever hasn't been tried before. Probably hundreds have tried it.
Journalism. That's the "problem" in a sense. If you want actual journalism, you need an article that gets 2000 clicks to have the same level of journalistic quality as one that gets 20000000.
Journalism all needs to be of a minimum level of quality. In a free market economy there will be a fair market price for that minimum level.
Unless the pay-per-clap thing is a bonus *beyond* fair market pay, or they set the rates to equal fair market pay intentionally, this will fail as inevitably writers will only do stories that will get a minimum number of clicks. Otherwise it won't be worth their time.
Thank you Dave Raggett
So all the writers have to do is gather a couple of friends to click that stupid button.
No it's not. It's LGBTQP+BBQ+UTC&A
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Bearing in mind you get a portion of the clappers subscription money based on their claps each of you Selenium sesions will need a paid subscription. Good luck with that
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Well done!
Ad-revenue driven websites have been in a race to the bottom, happily abandoning any sort of meaningful content in favor of clickbait that generates revenue. Switching the pay for the writers over to a formula derived from the number of clicks they generate is just the next step in that process.
And I never want to get it again!
People told him he was a bad writer because he chose to write "scary" books - stories about monsters and ghosts, latter-day fairy tales.
Uh, no. The fact that Stephen King made a shitload of money is why he got cared a "bad writer" over the years. If he hade made no money, no one would have cared. America has a literary tradition that anyone who writes for money and/or popular with the masses must be a hack. I'm honored to wear that badge, especially if it pisses off my merry band of trolls on Slashdot.
Did they even *try* to think that through?
Say goodbye to any topic that is even vaguely controversial.
Say hello to authors that harshly compete with one another, and potentially even start backstabbing one another.
The bottom line is that their quality will sink faster than... a very... fast... sinking... thing. *whistles*. (I was gonna say Trumps career but I'm sure everyone else is as sick to death about just reading that name, as I am...)
Maybe they could have done this as a bonus on top of a basic salary, but not as their entire salary.
This will definitely increase the value and in-depth content of the postings. There's nothing internet readers flock to more than a calm, rational, carefully balanced view of all perspectives of a critical issue.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
You're also not interested in your reader's reviews...
Reader's reviews should always be taken with a grain of salt, especially when the reviews are too negative or too positive.
But what if overall you have many negative reviews, and other people also laugh at you?
Being the proverbial fat boy on the short bus (a.k.a, fat retard), I'm used to negative reactions and being laughed at.
At what point can it become possible in your mind that you're a bad writer?
Never. Being a writer means you have to continuously improve yourself. What you write today won't be as good as something you write ten years from now.
But it's clear that you are interested, creimer.
I'm always interested whenever a troll starts a thread that I'm not a part of by making a snide comment about my sexuality.
How is that a trolling attempt? More reasonable than the pile of shit you posted (opinion without reasoning nor facts to back it up). And you obviously do care as you not only read the above post but replied to it.
So you are a hypocritical poster claiming to be spamming (=posting without being interested in a debate). Yeah. We call those trolls.
How is that a trolling attempt?
Because this is the fourth, fifth or sixth time that this particular AC told me that my writing sucks and then writes paragraphs about a literary debate I'm not interested in having.
I thought they were asking me to give them crap!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You are such a piece of shit and 100x worst than any troll I've seen here.
No, that would be the person who posted dick pics with my contact info.
On a non-writing topic, this website will save your life: https://intensivedietarymanage... [intensived...gement.com] I recommend starting here [intensived...gement.com], then reading around. There's many article series, with intermittent fasting being the most important.
What makes you think I would be interested in this unsolicited advice?
On a non-writing topic, this website will save your life: https://intensivedietarymanage... [intensived...gement.com]
I recommend starting here [intensived...gement.com], then reading around. There's many article series, with intermittent fasting being the most important.
What makes you think I would be interested in this unsolicited advice?
What makes you think I would be interested in unsolicited advice about books and other stuff?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
What makes you think I would be interested in unsolicited advice about books and other stuff?
As of yesterday, 3,525 clicks from interested Slashdotters so far this month.
We think you need it, just like you think we need your constant shitposting.
That's where you're wrong. My product recommendations are optional and can be freely ignore. Unsolicited advice about a person's health is usually an attempt to put yourself above that person, and, when that unsolicited advice is rejected out of hand as it should be, you will feel entitled to bitch at that person for not doing things your way. I got two words: suck it.
If you are "proud" to be fat, or too closed-minded to deviate from conventional diet advice, then by all means ignore it. Your loss.
When I had to take care of my father for two months after he had an episode that put him in the hospital, he had to got a diabetic nutrition class and go on a low-carb diet (150g per day). Since company loves misery, I had to take to him to class and go on the same diet. My father went off of insulin in six months because of the diet. I'm still on the low-carb diet after five years. I recently lost ten pounds and plateaued out at 360 pounds. And life goes on...
[...] when your weight makes you a public freak show and impacts your lifespan/quality of life [...]
Only on Slashdot.
August has been a weird month for sales. No sale for the first ten days. Got 50% of last month's sales in one weekend. No sales for another ten days. Daily sales are picking up now. Not sure if I'll get the other 50% this weekend or the remainder of the month. Click through rate is 50% higher than last month. People are kicking the tires but not buying much.