Medium is a blog site that utilizes a unique monetization system. Readers can pay to read “premium” articles or just read free articles. The “premium” articles have a system of likes called claps that when a reader “claps” an article the writer of the article receives a portion of the payment the reader paid. The reader pays five dollars for a subscription and that five dollars is distributed between all the “claps” they give to articles. The free articles work like any other blog site, where the claps are likes and the more claps an article gets the more likely it is to be favored by the algorithm. The site is designed in a minimalist fashion, having very few, if any ads, and limiting the visual stimulus to pictures and words from articles. Even for free accounts, the only ads shown are articles from other writers on medium. Medium has a very “millennial” feel to the website design, focusing on material and substance rather than trying to make money. Medium also follows the trend of subscription based services, like Netflix or Amazon prime. This subscription service model allows medium to have a premium feel to the whole site, even for free accounts. All these factors lead to a site that feels nice to read and browse, but creates a “walled garden” affect, limiting outside influence.
This “walled garden” that medium encourages can sometimes have a negative effect, as it allows the writers to write about almost anything, limiting oversight. In a traditional blog site/ news service the writers will be limited to advertiser friendly content, the same cannot be said for medium. Medium’s payment model incentivizes writers to create articles that produce the most claps, increasing revenue. While this can lead to articles of high quality, it also leads to articles that might be biased to the viewpoint that might get the most claps. This is best viewed in articles about history on medium, as history is a subject that can be viewed from multiple lenses but has a popular view that is biased. History in the modern era is inherently eruo-centric for most people, and this can be seen clearly throughout the medium articles. Most of them are focusing on the european side of history, World war 2, Rome, early medieval, etc. Despite just searching up “history” on the browser, there were multiple articles on european history and very few on other eras. The reason this happens originates back in the “clap” system as the website incentivizes the articles to get more claps. As most people know euro-centric history, the articles will tend to focus on the european theater. This produces a bias in the reader and limits the amount of history that can be effectively be shown on medium.
The monetization system doesn’t solely affect history; politics, science, and others are also affected by the “clap” system and its euro-centric view. While medium might say they are free from the influence of the advertisers, bloggers are never free from the influencer of the reader. The “clap” system simply moves the influence from advertisers to the readers and as shown, this isn’t inherently better than advertisers.
Clinton's life 