Slowclap Update: Events

Massive update to slowclap today that’s all about making it easier for you track, generate, and celebrate support! It breaks down into 3 features:

• ✨ events
• 🎉 goals
• 🤝 and sharing

✨ events

the old utilitarian view of your applause sent and received has been replaced with a new unified timeline that makes it much easier to understand how much applause you sent/received, where it came from (if they opted to share) and when. This system also dynamically batches applause as it gets further in the past so individual small applause from the same sender will only overwhelm this feed when it’s so recent as to be relevant and fun to see.

🎉 goals

building off this is a system that’s designed to be a fun challenge for you and your community, make it feel less crappy asking for support, and also circumvent the need for paywalls. Goals are automatically generated based on the applause you’ve currently received and reset monthly. Once you achieve one goal, you unlock the next. Your most recently achieved goal and the one you’re working towards are both displayed on your account page.

Paywalls are a pretty common part of patronage platforms and I personally hate them. I think they often push weird obligations, transactionalize relationships that should be supportive, and require platform lock in or APIs that are detrimental to the decentralized, indie web.

Goals are a much better solution IMO, rather than letting people unlock some extra feature if they pay you enough, have your community work together to unlock something for everyone. If we can get to 10000 applause this month, I’ll post an extra story! I’ll do a behind the scenes video if we reach 5000 applause! Yes this works better at higher goal tiers, but I wanted these to feel achievable for everyone no matter where they are in building an audience and I think it’s a fun approach for that!

🤝 sharing

building off both these systems, there’s now a share button next to each goal and event that will generate a custom share card for any platform that supports them, automatically linking back to where you’d expect.

These share cards are dynamic, describe the event and goal being shared IN the image (the part that people actually look at on share cards) and they respect your custom theme!

I’m really proud of these features and how they streamline asking for support, celebrating support received (or given) and provide more clarity to Slowclap creators. I hope they continue to extend my goal of making Slowclap the best platform for creators to get support without spending all their energy managing a separate patronage business. I hope you’ll try them out!

I will stress these features are in beta and may have bugs! Please let me know if anything isn’t working properly, and expect more updates to these features soon!