It Doesn't Cost Anything

 

My son asked me about how Medium.com works in terms of payments for published work. I’m not certain anyone actually understands this, including those at Medium. Sometimes it seems as if they are making the system up as they go. He wanted to see which stories I had written had earned money to link to Facebook in hopes of increasing reader engagement for my work.

He asked a lot of intelligent questions such as why did it seem like stories that are published in a publication get more “claps”? He wanted to know about Medium’s Partner program. I explained it as best as I understood it. I showed him how we can clap for any story we read, and that when we do that, a portion of our monthly membership fee is allotted to the authors we clap for. Then he asked me something I would never have thought of: “Does it cost you anything to clap for a story?” It seemed obvious to me that it wouldn’t. But I suppose we should never assume anything. I told him there was no payment required and we could clap up to 50 times per story. The next natural question was can we clap for my stories? Um, no.

I started thinking about my clapping mindset. Did it ever feel like it costs something to clap? Not really. It is difficult to arrive at an appropriate number of claps. Yet, I’m usually sure about those that warrant the maximum. I try to be generous. As in life, it doesn’t cost anything to heap praise on others.