2 Reasons Why We Should Earn Money From Our Responses on Medium
And 3 reasons why it would be a bad idea
We earn money when people read our stories, but we don’t earn anything for the responses we write.
But what if we did?
Let’s take a look at the points for and against.
Why we SHOULD earn money from our responses
It would encourage more engagement
If members knew they would earn money from their comments, they would write more comments. Everyone’s articles would get many more comments, making Medium more interactive.
People could earn without writing articles
Can’t think of anything to write an article about? No problem. Post comments on other people’s articles and still earn money.
Why it would be a BAD idea
It might lead to loads of copy-pasted comments
There might be an influx of generic responses like “Great article! I can’t wait to read more like this!”
At the moment, people usually only write comments when they have something they want to say. But if people know they’re going to earn money for comments, will they post worthless comments?
People might write too many long comments
As I have already said elsewhere, long comments can annoy article writers. It’s better to write a new article instead.
But if people got paid for comment read time, they might post long comments rather than new articles. This could get annoying for writers, having to wade through them all.
We’d write fewer articles
Some people would give up on writing articles. They would focus their time on writing comments on other people’s articles instead. If too many writers did this, there would be far fewer articles. All with an unmanageable number of comments on them.
Where would this lead? Medium would end up with one article a week posted by Tim Denning which gets a million comments an hour.