I hope the new changes more closely align with increases in followers
I haven’t focused on Medium much until recently so I can’t say that I was ever trying real hard to get followers. I just wrote whatever I felt like for free and didn’t pay much attention.
But lately I’ve been wishing that I could just write on Medium for a living. That’s a pipe dream at the moment. It’s not even a remote possibility. But at the very least, what I would love to see, is that Medium payouts start to become more correlated with how many people follow me or sign up for my email list.
What I do not want is to have my payouts somehow tied to comments. Some people say nice things like “great post” and so on. I love that. But taking the time to deal with incorrect, angsty, one-upmanship type comments takes time away from writing new content. I just block comments so I don’t have to deal with things like that. It’s those one-off nasty comments, someone who simply dislikes you for whatever reason, someone trying to imply you don’t know what you don’t know what you’re talking about because they are working as a competitor, someone who thinks they are smarter than you (got get your own Medium blog) — I just don’t want to deal with all that.
For the posts that do get a lot of comments I would guess, if it is anything like Twitter, they are political in nature or stirring up controversy. Comment are not always a sign of good content. People generally give comments and leave reviews when they are unhappy more often than when they are happy. Comments are not a good judge of something worthy of payment.
What is worthy of payment is content that is helping people solve problems, learn, be entertained, feel better, etc. (Not more angry!)
People will sign up or follow those authors that they enjoy reading and whose content they want to see more. Followers — and followers that read the content — is a much better sign of a worthy author than comments. Even better, if someone spends money to get more of that author’s work, then you know that author is worthy and not followed by a bunch of bots.
Anyway, I hope that the whole idea of comments as a factor in how authors get paid gets removed as I think it contributes to some of the problems on social media. It also slows authors down having to respond to those comments instead of writing more useful, beautiful, or entertaining content.
As I’m looking at my followers they consistently grow each month. I wonder how my payments over time have correlated to growth in payments. My followers and email subscribers have gone up this month even though reads have gone down and payments seem to be lower. It seems that if more people are following me then payments should be rising. But I don’t really understand the whole payment model on Medium I just hope it becomes a more viable income stream soon because I love to write and want to be able to focus on it more to help people solve cybersecurity problems.
At the very minimum, it seems that if I am getting more followers I should be getting more money. Medium, of course, need mechanisms for uncovering fraud and bots that are trying to game the system. Although I am not always a fan of Elon Musk, he is right I think in that the only way to curtail bots is by focusing on members who pay for the content.
If members actually pay for the content and they clap for an author or follow an author, that should be worth more than non-paying members who write comments — or any comments in my opinion. If they didn’t clap, they may be commenting because the article makes them mad, not because they like it. And why would Medium want to encourage writing that makes people mad because it is controversial or false information? That really doesn’t make any sense.
If an author has a small following but 90% of those followers are paid members, that is more valuable to Medium than an author with millions of followers and yet almost none of them pay for membership. And comments are mostly worthless as metric, in my opinion.
Case in point: I inadvertently left comments open on a story and someone literally just asked me for information IN THE STORY. Comments are a complete waste of time. People comment who don’t even read what is written! Please stop using comments as a metric.
Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2023
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