4 ms·

Micro-payments for publishing. Medium (and other quality essay sites) should charge per essay. Nothing too big, have a scaled system that is affordable to all.

by Jaruzel 11y ago

Micro-payments for publishing. Medium (and other quality essay sites) should charge per essay. Nothing too big, have a scaled system that is affordable to all. Even a small payment of 1GBP/USD/EUR per post is enough to keep the spammers away. It might not deter the paid for corporate shilling, but it would be a good start. I've not thought this through in depth - feel free to pick holes in it, but I firmly believe that the mess we're suffering on the self-published areas of the internet are because it's free-to-post. So to maintain a level of quality there needs to be some sort of barrier to entry.

kristianc 11y ago
I can see that it would lead to a deluge of 'Like this post? Please consider donating so I can continue spewing forth banal crap I lifted from Internet articles about Elon Musk' quite quickly.
daveguy 11y ago
Do you mean pay per article or pay per view? Per view would virtually eliminate the independent submitter and select for the spam and corporate shills. Who has the cash or wants to risk a penny per view (or whatever micropayment it is) except for corporate advertising? I don't think per article would fix the problem either. It is a sea of crap because of the quality more than quantity. If you are getting views then a penny or whatever micropayment per article is nothing. I doubt this guy would stick around if he had to pay per view and I doubt per post payment would limit the crap. The most effective way would be some sort of peer reviewed limitation, but that is difficult to implement and would likely reduce medium's viewership (management says oh the horror of sensationalist articles in one direction and yes! Page views! in the other). There will be a transition to another blogging platform that sets up the right barrier to entry / moderation. Personally I don't think it is monetary.
morgante 11y ago
The marketing "assholes" would be the ones most capable of paying to publish. (Publish press releases actually costs money!) The supposed problem on Medium isn't automated spam, it's marketing.
adrusi 11y ago
Why would anyone want to pay to put an article on medium? They had better offer quite an impressive array of discovery features if I'm paying them to use a service that gives me less control over my own content than I would otherwise have. The problem isn't that people are posting low quality, low effort content on medium. That's a problem that micropayments would solve. The problem is that it has become popular on medium to post certain types of content that other medium users find distasteful. There's not much a site like medium can do to resolve a conflict of values in its userbase without restructuring the experience to enable the community to fragment, probably at the expense of some nice thing or another.
mtw 11y ago
Actually it should be the other way around. This is a bit like saying filmmakers who put their movies on netflix should pay a little bit of money.

by Jaruzel 11y ago

kristianc 11y ago

I can see that it would lead to a deluge of 'Like this post? Please consider donating so I can continue spewing forth banal crap I lifted from Internet articles about Elon Musk' quite quickly.

daveguy 11y ago

Do you mean pay per article or pay per view? Per view would virtually eliminate the independent submitter and select for the spam and corporate shills. Who has the cash or wants to risk a penny per view (or whatever micropayment it is) except for corporate advertising? I don't think per article would fix the problem either. It is a sea of crap because of the quality more than quantity. If you are getting views then a penny or whatever micropayment per article is nothing. I doubt this guy would stick around if he had to pay per view and I doubt per post payment would limit the crap. The most effective way would be some sort of peer reviewed limitation, but that is difficult to implement and would likely reduce medium's viewership (management says oh the horror of sensationalist articles in one direction and yes! Page views! in the other). There will be a transition to another blogging platform that sets up the right barrier to entry / moderation. Personally I don't think it is monetary.

morgante 11y ago

The marketing "assholes" would be the ones most capable of paying to publish. (Publish press releases actually costs money!) The supposed problem on Medium isn't automated spam, it's marketing.

adrusi 11y ago

Why would anyone want to pay to put an article on medium? They had better offer quite an impressive array of discovery features if I'm paying them to use a service that gives me less control over my own content than I would otherwise have. The problem isn't that people are posting low quality, low effort content on medium. That's a problem that micropayments would solve. The problem is that it has become popular on medium to post certain types of content that other medium users find distasteful. There's not much a site like medium can do to resolve a conflict of values in its userbase without restructuring the experience to enable the community to fragment, probably at the expense of some nice thing or another.

mtw 11y ago

Actually it should be the other way around. This is a bit like saying filmmakers who put their movies on netflix should pay a little bit of money.