What do you think of Medium’s “clapping” system?
I’m not recommending this for Tildes or anything, I just wanted to know your thoughts on it.
For those who are unfamiliar with it, on Medium, you can “applaud” articles and comments. To do this, you hold down the clap button, and depending on how long you hold it down, the more applause you give (up to a limit of 50). The best example would probably be if you go on any Medium article and try it yourself.
I’ve never really seen any discussion on it, so I was interested in hearing your thoughts.
I think the idea of essentially having to convert time holding down a button to a number of likes is interesting.
The problems that come to mind are that you could easily automate it, and that it could suffer the “5 star” rating system problem, where the majority of people will either dislike something enough to rate it 1 star, love it enough to rate it 5 stars, or not care enough to rate it at all (or in this case, give it 50 claps or nothing).
I think you pretty much nailed it on the head with the 5 star problem and potential automation.
Time does not have the same value to everyone so effectively you're making it cheaper for people with more time to have a greater influence - which I'm not sure will give you better content. Rather stuff that's geared towards patient and/or people with more time on their hands?
Maybe if your trying to give people who care a greater influence, make their vote count more based on the number/length of the comments they make under that post?
Dang, didn't think about this. I was first thinking it would be a cool system because forcing people to spend time to really reward comments seems good on paper... but you're right. If I was posting on a day off, my time would be worth way less than posting at work where I have things to do.
...I never realized you could hold it down...
I've probably subtracted a year on my mouse's life from clicking repeatedly to clap
Aww that's so sweet you actually clap your mouse for people
I don’t think this particular mechanic is bad in itself. The problem is the Medium environment: a walled garden social network centered on writing. They’re the Instagram of blogging. People are more concerned in exchanging likes than making good content. When I see a Medium post with 1000 claps, it means nothing to me. When I see a Tildes post with 10 votes or a Reddit one with 1000 (depending on the sub), I know there must be something interesting about it.
I won't even read an article if it's hosted on Medium. It's nothing but a content farm specializing mainly -- at least in my experience -- in bad self-help, hot takes, and Silicon Valley techwank. Why should I help make Ev Williams even richer and more powerful than he already is by supporting Medium?
I actually think this is a good idea, and I think it actually circumvents the pitfalls of a five star system.
For one thing, clicking five-stars versus one-star is no different, and they both function similar to the upvote system. It only take a single click to reach the desired goal. With the applause system, If I'm understanding correctly from what you said, then it would take some time to reach the applause limit. I feel like if it functioned as one clap per second, with a maximum of fifty claps, then someone would have to hold the button for nearly a minute to fully upvote it, which most wouldn't be willing to do for most posts.
I think that with the applause system, the truly amazing posts will be the ones that most people would be willing to hold down the applause button for fifty seconds. Likewise, low-effort posts like memes and pictures of animals would only get 1-10 seconds at most. Maybe this could be a way for Tildes to slowly approach low-effort content? So people that want lower-quality stuff can set that as one of their preferences? Just a thought.
The idea of having a sort of scale of how high/low effort a piece of content is is quite interesting, and while I'm not sure that it would ever fit the goals of Tildes, maybe for a different kind of website it could work nicely.
Also - I guess it's not all that important - but I measured it, and it takes 10 seconds to get to 50 claps, but increasing the time could help to avoid the 5 star problem.