A Fairerer, Betterer, Equally Cheap Way to Boost Stories

This idea is free, but if Coach Tony wants to pay for it, that’s fine

A response to Smillew Rahcuef’s recent suggestion for a fairer, better boost nomination system.

Don’t Pay Writers

Smillew suggested in his article that writers shouldn’t be paid. Boo!

No, wait, he only meant they shouldn’t be paid to nominate stories. That would make more sense: after all, he is a writer (he tells me), and while I imagine he would like to be paid less — to relieve the strain on his wallet — he probably wouldn’t want to work for free.

He suggested recruiting an ever-changing contingent of 2,000 writers, drawn mostly from the relatively successful or stubbornly persistent, and allowing them to nominate stories to boost, but rewarding them with …nothing at all.

I like this idea. I like it a lot more than a hand-picked few earning up to $900 a month for doing what amounts to little more than clapping, but louder.

I have a betterer idea.

Don’t Pay Readers

Medium already implements this idea. In fact, readers pay Medium.

The thing is, I’m a writer, but I’m also a reader. I don’t read as much as I’d like to, because I’m usually busy writing, so I’d be a terrible nominator: I’d mostly be nominating my friends, because it’s their work I make time to read.

I don’t think my experience is uncommon. Elsewhere, another writer revealed that in a private chat, “[Name redacted] was musing that he might be the only fiction nominator … and he is always saying he has barely any time to read.”

I write fiction. I’m already disappointed that there might only be one fiction nominator, so I’m gutted to discover they barely read anything. They weren’t going to read my stories anyway, because I mainly write degenerate filth, but they’re not reading your stories either.

So who does have time to read?

If you said ‘constipated people’, award yourself half a point for a correct but incomplete answer. If you said ‘readers’ then take the whole point, and give it to Coach Tony because he’s missing it.

Reader’s read. It’s right there in the name. So why not allow some readers to shout, “I read this! It was so good I’m not only politely clapping, I want you to read it too!”

Give Readers a ‘Boost’ Button

There could be a ‘Boost’ button right beside the ‘Clap’ button. Maybe it only appears when you give a story fifty claps. Or perhaps it pops up when you’re adding a comment. Whatever. The point is: let readers tell other readers what they could be reading.

And don’t pay the readers for boosting. Sharing what you enjoy is a privilege, not a job.

Quality Issues

Coach Tony wants to improve the ‘quality’ of writing on Medium, by allowing ‘quality’ writers to nominate ‘quality’ stories. I haven’t seen his definition of ‘quality’, and I suspect he doesn’t have one. I think he wants to be CEO of a ‘quality’ company, by making Medium a ‘quality’ journal that appeals to ‘quality’ readers, because that would boost his ego.

As an aside: no quality company should be run by people called Coach and Buster. Coach and Buster run bars for expats in Malaga and Bangkok.

A CEO has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders of their company, not to their own ego. Tony’s priority ought to be growing subscriber numbers, not writing quality. If people want to pay Medium for the chance to read, he should be happy even if they’re reading — to choose an example entirely at random — degenerate filth. If others want to pay the same subscription and read only ‘quality’ articles, they can follow ‘quality’ publications and writers.

But Tony does like quality. So maybe don’t give the ‘Boost’ button to every reader? Define what ‘quality’ is, find examples of ‘quality’ writing, and add the ‘Boost’ button only for readers who consistently read ‘quality’. The data already exist to do that… except that vital data point where Tony explains what quality is.

But boosting is itself a sign of quality. Real quality. It’s a sign that someone was sufficiently impressed by a story that they’d recommend it to others. That wouldn’t help me much — even if I write high-quality degenerate filth, people generally don’t recommend filth because they don’t want people find out they’re degenerates — but it could help other writers.

And it might help Medium, too. Writers typically don’t have real lives, but readers do. Readers can even have friends, some of whom aren’t on Medium. And the sort of reader who gets a kick out of boosting is the sort of reader who’ll tell their real-life friends, “I boosted this great story on Medium. You should sign up and read it.”

It’s That Simple

Let readers boost whatever they think is worth reading. Let them boost on Medium, and so encourage them to boost Medium in real life. Everybody wins, except writers of degenerate filth.

That’s fairerer, it’s betterer, and it might even be cheaperer, because boosters would already be paying for the privilege.