The Medium Clapping Clubs (Now Also on Substack!)

How writers get many views, claps, and comments

Nov 04, 2024

This story was previously published on Medium. I thought that Substack was different, but recently, I noticed a post from one of the substacks I subscribe to, inviting people to join a special chat and use that as a starting point for taking part in a “liking club” where everybody likes each other’s posts… Here we go again!

I am sharing the old Medium-story on Substack to inspire people to think about what they are actually doing.

Wherever there is money, there will be people trying to grab it.

Medium has money — meant to be given as a reward to writers when their articles are being read.

But as a writer, you need to be lucky: your article must get noticed by others, they must decide to look at it — and various rules that Medium has set will then decide if the writer will get anything, and how much.

But why count on being lucky, some will then say.

The myth about quality writing

Medium has spoken a lot about how they want to promote quality writing.

There are various activities for ensuring that quality writing may be rewarded, individually and human-read-based, through the Boost concept.

Medium’s Quality Guidelines describe how this works.

The same guidelines also tell about how an article (or a “story”) will be distributed, according to its contents. So, if it is not boosted, it may instead be set for General Distribution or Network Only.

In short, the three distribution models imply:

Boost: Will get higher priority in the story to user matching. Meaning, the algorithm that decides what to suggest to you in the various places will more likely prefer this story over those that are not boosted — leading to the boosted story being suggested more often. A set of criteria guides the people who select stories for boosting.
General Distribution: The default — most stories are treated like this. They will be suggested in various places, such as the end of stories you are reading, the “For you” tab on the front page, and the Medium newsletters. They will be matched to the reader’s interest and who the reader is following.
Network Only: A long line of reasons may limit the distribution to only the writer’s direct followers and the followers of the publication in which the story is published. Stories about Medium, for instance, are limited in this way — so the one you are reading now will most likely have that limitation.

In reality, you will see lots of the expected Network Only stories in your suggestions, and it may have various reasons — for instance that you are following back when someone is following you. You will then see their stories suggested, also if they are about Medium. A special tag should be added voluntarily to the story to ensure that it will be restricted (I wonder, though, how many writers would want to use such a tag?)

So why do I call the quality writing a myth?

Because everybody seems to follow a lot of writers — the general style of using Medium leads to this, as does the user interface’s strong promotion of the fact that someone is now following you, allowing you to follow back with a single click.

You may then see the boosted stories in your suggestions, but you see also many others.

Also, the boosted stories seem to me to be focused on what Americans like to read. A lot of it is about the USA, in one way or another, often including local references to politics and events relevant only for people who live in this geography. This part, however, is something I will dive into later.

As I understand it, the boosted stories can be found in the Medium Staff Picks list.

How to get your stories read — in theory

Either you are very lucky and see your story getting boosted, so that it will be suggested many times to many readers, or you are not that lucky.

This is one of the game elements on the Medium platform — you don’t know how many people will ever get the chance to even know that your story exists.

Or your story is suggested to your followers only, due to the Network Only distribution, and in that case publishing in a publication will effectively increase your amount of followers relevant for that story.

Or you may, in addition to your own followers, also have your story suggested to “strangers” — such people who are not already following you.

In all cases, there will be a matching mechanism in play, trying to find stories to suggest that match the readers preferences, based on several factors, such as the selected topics (from the front page’s “Recommended topics” section), what those people the reader follows are reading, clapping for, etc., and probably also various promotional factors, which the boosting could be seen as.

But the chance of having your story suggested to potential readers is still only a chance game. It may be suggested to many or few, it is almost out of your control.

The only bit of influence you can have on this is to use a catching headline and image. If then your story is suggested to a reader, the reader may on this basis decide to click on it — and it then has a view.

Please check my article (on Medium), Writing for Profit — A Primer to see why a view is not enough; it needs to become a read. If you want to earn money, that is.

How to get your stories read — in reality

A few years ago, Medium saw a phenomenon happen: the Read-for-read.

It works by agreeing with other writers that you will read each other's stories.

Quite innocent, apparently, and honestly, a good way for learning writers to become better, as those other readers may comment with some useful feedback that could help you move on and see new angles.

But that was not the reason for doing it. People wanted to make their own boosting, so to say, and make sure that their stories would be read by many — thereby making more money.

The read-for-read concept became a milking concept, dragging out the money of Medium’s pool of funds meant to pay writers.

Today, you will find many read-for-read arrangements on Medium, stretching from simple agreements between friends — or even just polite reading of friends’ stories without a specific agreement — to organized clubs of mutual readers.

With Medium’s updated earnings scheme as of late summer 2023, the mutual reads became supplemented with mutual clapping and commenting, as these elements add to the payouts made.

So, calling them clapping clubs is not wrong — these are organizations of people who pump up their earnings on Medium, often on the basis of simple writing without any particular value for anyone, and often through publishing many of these stories. It can be five or ten per day, none of them adding anything useful to the literary scene in any way.

The clapping clubs are often arranged through publications on Medium, where the writers must obey to a rule of reading “at least ten of their fellow publication writers’ stories each day”, or whatever they have decided. Or they are arranged elsewhere, for instance on Facebook, where there are large groups of people who this way promise to drive up the earnings of each other.

More recently, special Friend of Medium clapping clubs have appeared, designed to drag out the money that Friends of Medium were supposed to be charitably giving to the writers in need. Seems like many Friends consider their own needs to be the most important.

From time to time, you will see how people complain about such agreements not being honoured, leading to blocking each other and other sanctions, making Medium a battlefield for the disappointed, betrayed clapping club members.

If you want to reach the big earnings that some writers write about — and you must have noticed that there are huge amounts of stories about exactly this topic — then you are not really getting there by playing the chance game, as designed by Medium. You will have to create and nurture your luck with such arrangements.

People who struggle to earn anything, or who may have one good month with 20 $ earning — in the line of “less than 5 $”-months — they are not doing that. It may be that they write excellent articles about interesting topics, but when all the money goes to the clapping club members, there is nothing left for the normal writers.

The end game

Well, I am not the one who can end that clapping game, but for this article you are now reading, the end has been reached.

An ironic detail of the Medium story distribution system is that an article like this one will by definition get a limited distribution — because it tells about how Medium works — and therefore, many people, who may have wanted to know about this phenomenon, cannot be reached.

As I am not trying to play games, there will naturally be many other writers on Medium who earn the money, not me. Friends of Medium will earn more money through the special clapping clubs for Friends of Medium, and that has led me to the conclusion that this apparent concept of charity is, in reality, a big hoax.

Medium is by definition a game, having an economical reward system based on a chance game, but wherever people a gambling for money, there will be clever parallel games developed to challenge the official game and steal the money.

A slot machine may be challenged by a magnet (according to some movies), and a card game may be challenged by mirrors, so you can spy on your opponents’ cards — and the Medium game can, obviously, be challenged by the concept of clapping clubs.

I just wonder if this is already known or even foreseen by the Medium staff?

Postscript

On Substack, there has seemingly been a flood of chat requests - at least, I have seen people on Notes talk about them and also myself received many. Most recently, I decided to actually talk to one of these - after checking, that there were some activities behind the pseudonym who asked, i.e., not just an empty account.

Most of such unsolicited contact requests are attempts to sell something - or to initiate some kind of scam. This one, however, was a somewhat weird concept that turned out to be a chatbot - it admitted it directly in the conversation, so there can’t be much doubt about that.

So, we have liking clubs, scammers, and bots contacting people.

While this all may seem quite negative, it also indicates that Substack is seen as part of life. Like a marketplace, which attracts such as pickpockets, grey money exchange agents, and cheating sellers who put four apples in the bag when you actually bought five.

Cheating is a sign of life, you could say. We have so much life here, generating so much value, that people see a potential for grabbing something out of it.

This means: If you were in doubt about spending time on Substack instead of the real world - well, you are in the real world :)