Mind the Clap

Thoughts on Medium’s “Clap” feature and content compensation

With the rollout of a host of new features to Medium last week, a number of folks have asked for my take on the changes. I happen to be on vacation at the moment, but obviously have some thoughts. And luckily, I like writing! As always, my view is at least somewhat tinted through the prism of GV’s investment in Medium, but these thoughts are my own.

First and foremost, I love the new logo and overall branding update. It both calls back to the OG Medium logo, but retains some of what made the last logo unique (the sloping serifs). A great blend. And I’m happy to see the green gone.

Related, the new loading screen in the app is quite nice. It seems like one of those things I could grow tired of eventually simply because there’s a lot going on. But for now, I enjoy it each time — even if it does linger for a second or two too long at launch.

Ah, who am I kidding? All anyone really wants to know about is my opinion on claps. You 👏 know 👏 of 👏 what 👏 I 👏 speak 👏.

The name of the functionality, I think, is unfortunate. To state the obvious, three main reasons:

1. In case you weren’t aware, “the clap” is also the nickname of an STD. That’s funny, you see. Unless you happen to have gonorrhea. Then I imagine it’s decidedly unfunny. But there was no way to pick that name and avoid the jokes.

2. In the last election season, then Republican candidate Jeb Bush managed to turn the action into a meme. Specifically, it’s now hard to associate the non-STD version of the clap with anything other than the pitifully amusing, “please clap”.

3. Even without these first two issues, the actual action of clapping ranges from trivial to silly. During a concert, it’s a way to show approval, but it’s a decidedly free way. Medium is trying to make their version of the clap something almost the opposite (more on this in a second). If you wanted to really reward a band or a singer or an orchestra or the like, you might say, throw some flowers on stage. Flowers are not free (unless you picked them, I suppose). Or even better, you might buy a t-shirt or CD of the performance. Also not free.

Let’s cast aside the first two complaints. I personally would have gone with “applaud” (like Anchor and others do) or something entirely different.¹ But, oh well, maybe the jokes will fade with time and Medium will redefine the clap. Or maybe the STD will be eradicated.

The third point speaks to something bigger, I think. I suspect the real reason some folks are up in arms (the puns continue!) about clapping is that it seems like a silly and trivial thing, and yet it’s now directly tied into Medium’s efforts to pay content creators. I’ll admit, these two things can be hard to reconcile at first.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. In fact, I think that at a high level, it’s a very compelling idea masked by a twee feature. That is, the notion that you can have control over how a writer is recognized and as such, compensated in granular fashion.

Yes, the “recommend” is conceptually more elegant. But at best, it leads to troublesome cognitive load. (Should I really recommend this post? I liked it, but not as much as the last one I recommended. Is this really worth my stamp of approval? Etc.) At worst, it leads to a lot of the same gaming nonsense that happens all over the rest of the social web. (And yes, people will obviously still be pleading for claps — though Medium discourages it — but the granularity allows for enough obfuscation so that Medium can work magic behind-the-scenes to make the system work.)

When people ask why Medium doesn’t simply focus on time read — which is a metric the company previously held dear — they’re missing a key aspect: this implies the best content is the longest content. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes that’s decidedly not true. One of my favorite publishers is The Economist, and it’s one of my favorite precisely because they don’t go on and on more than they have to about a topic. Coming from the content world myself, I learned long ago that it’s often harder to write a great shorter post than it is to write a mediocre longer post.²

I’ve been using the clap functionality for several weeks now (in testing before it was live), and in practice, I really like it. Honestly! Yes, it’s playful. But it’s also nice to know that I can provide feedback in a granular way. Give it some time to see how it fits into this new paradigm.

That last bit is the key here. Medium is trying to establish a new paradigm when it comes to compensating writers. This is going to take both time and experimentation, but the end result is something I think everyone is rooting for. And while it’s fine to say that Medium shouldn’t be a middleman here, as Ben Thompson did this past week in his Stratechery newsletter (paywalled, but well worth the subscription).³ The reality is that not everyone can be a Ben Thompson and go direct-to-fans to earn a living.

Yes, there are a group of people who can, and do, and will do that. And yes, thanks to the magic of the internet, that number is continually increasing. But there will always be a far greater number of folks for which such economics will not work, for a variety of cascading reasons.

Even if someone was able to attract the size of the audience required to make such a move possible, over time, people would grow wary of subscribing to yet another publication, entering payment information for it, etc. This is similar to the current backlash we’re seeing in the great unbundling of cable television. Sounds great on paper, but in reality, it’s a lot of work to hunt down and pay for all the content you want.

I won’t compare Medium to the cable company — the horror! — but I do believe that in order for large scale payments to work here, there needs to be a centralized player (or, more likely, a handful of players — Patreon, for example, is also doing interesting things in the general space). Said another way, there needs to be an iTunes of the space. It’s not a perfect analogy (and neither is the more obvious one, Netflix, by the way), but it’s about taking something currently cumbersome and broken — paying for content online — and changing the mindset around it. A unifying layer that makes it so simple to pay for something that it’s a no-brainer to do so.

If Medium is successful in their attempts, it opens up options to a whole new range of folks. This payment layer, plus reach, plus discovery would change things — including potentially for larger folks as well, down the road. Easier said than done, of course. But it’s a goal worth applauding. Please clap.

¹ To be fair, Medium does label the claps as “applause” when in aggregate.

² This is, of course, a big part of the reason why I chose the name 500ish Words as the name of this site. And I’m failing at this cause as we speak!

³ Though we can argue about whether or not Medium should be more in the background as a unifying payment/technology/discovery layer and less a destination.