Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/22/please-clap-its-how-medium.html
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Medium should introduce a negative counterpart to “clap” called “slap.”
Indeed. W. C. Fields said much the same:
“Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.”
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And let the STD jokes commence.
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Because it’s rarely well done.
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I guess it wasn’t enough that they were festooning my screen with dickbars, now they have to add clapbars.
Fortunately there is a content blocker for that, although it really should be renamed “condom” or something.
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It’s an interesting experiment. We’ll have to see how it does and what sort of behaviour it ends up encouraging.
Because I can totally see what they’re trying to fix.
Some websites already reward their contributors on the basis of page views, which obviously gives an incentive to produce clickbait, or, as I often see on newspaper websites: outrage-bait- stories which are readily refuted as false, based on faulty logic, or cherry-picked statistics, but they get lots of people viewing them to join in bashing the sheer awfulness of the article in the comments.
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That reminds me, I need to cash in my BB likes. I have ~5,100 of them. If possible, I only want to redeem the first $20,000 worth. Do you need a bank routing number, or a tax ID number, or how does this work?
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This is a brilliant way to do micropayments. The subscriber pays a fixed amount for access; that fee is paid (minus some overhead, natch) among the contributors on a pro rata basis.
I’d like to see this implemented on a cross-site basis. I’d be willing to pay $100/month for access to “news” – but I’m damn well not going to pay individual subscriptions to the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Time, Business Journal, Le Monde, and a couple dozen more. Let me direct, via “claps” (ugh that coinage is execrable), how my month’s $100 should be apportioned. (If I give only two claps all month, they’re worth $50 each.)
Let the subscriber choose how much they’re willing to pay every month. Individual sites opt into the system by lowering their paywalls to subscribers; each site can set a minimum subscriber level ($10/mo, $50/mo) according to their sense of the market. But very important: if they get no claps from me in a particular month, they get zero share of my $100.
To my mind, this strikes a good balance. Purely individual news reporting won’t work because good news reporting is a team effort, and requires institutional memory. The site has a reputation to build and defend; I can choose the sites I find reputable, enjoyable, entertaining, reliable, or whatever. If a site starts putting up large amounts of clapbait (admit it: you knew that term was inevitable), I can ignore them and deprive them of my clapshare.
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I give it a week before people cheat the system with clap bots.
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It’s an awkward gesture, but consider that they are trying to pay people, which separates them from a lot of the garbage on the web.
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Clap, clap for Tinkerbell or she’ll be dead forever!
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Fortunately, there’s no way to game this system. Almost certainly not. Well, probably not.
Okay, maybe.
Make that definitely. It’ll be a shit-show.
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Will the author be paid the same whether I go click…click…click…click…click…click…click, or
Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick?
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Pays out in soros bucks I think, connect it to your account for that; right between the redeem options for paid protests and tree hugging.
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more fuel to the fire of the “Americans clap all the time” meme. Next there’ll be a virtual fountain we can throw coins in.
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I"m to lazy to self clap. I’d want to use a bot for that.
Erotic fiction would have the f… (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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