One of the ways I think Medium is missing the boat with their clapping system is the fact that there is no payment for claps and reads received from non-members. While this makes a certain kind of sense because members pay the bills and it almost certainly lessens cheating, it doesn’t reward members for writing articles that create google traffic or get shared outside the Medium bubble. And these are activities that eventually bolster memberships.

I wrote an article a couple months ago about a scam that preys on writers, and while it didn’t get a staggering amount of views (2.9k so far), almost half of them were from Google. Only 131 of the almost 3,000 views came from Medium. Because of this, I’ve received very few claps from members and made under $15 for it to date. This in spite of the fact that I’ve succeeded in attracting new readers to the platform, several of whom went on to become members.

I’m okay with this in the case of this particular article, which I wrote in hopes of protecting my fellow writers from an unsavory organization, but I’m concerned that the people who do write regularly for Medium are incentivized to write specifically for the other writers of the platform rather than a wide audience. This has a great impact on the diversity of content and will not succeed in attracting new paying members. Something we all need.