Slowclap Design Philosophy: Attribution

Attribution is something the internet has struggled to get right, and obviously if I had come up with a system for guaranteeing proper attribution I assume I’d be very wealthy, but while there are certainly a lot of bad actors out there that are actively trying to take credit for other people’s work, I think most people are well intentioned and are just trying to share cool stuff in not the best way.

slowclap already addresses some of this just by the nature of shifting the value of something shared on the internet from the moment it captures attention to instead be about an active choice to appreciate it. But that still relies on people citing where it came from.

Compounding that, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you… audience building is a LOT of work. There is inherent value in sharing someone else’s work with a large audience for both parties and currently there aren’t a lot of good ways to reflect that without pre-negotiation that usually doesn’t happen.

slowclap mitigates this with a feature I’m guessing most of you don’t know exists or understand its purpose: 🥾 kickbacks

I should preface that kickbacks only work when the content you’re referring is on someone’s website and they’re using the JavaScript snippet.

But you can “refer” any link by adding a redirect like so:

slowcl.app/feisty-goblin/out?to=https://nicholasjcollins.com/origin (Please excuse the shameless self promotion.)

If you are logged in and click my “support” button from there you should see:

🥾 feisty-goblin

And that means that any applause you give me for that specific page will kickback 10% to… feisty-goblin!

You can get your redirect from your account/manage page and all you have to do is add it before any link and it just works!

This will only trigger for people that click your link obviously. But this means even if you run a link blog or share stuff here, You can still benefit from being on slowclap. And this works everywhere! It’s just a link, it routes invisibly through slowclap to store the referral and then on to the website.

You can also use them on every link. If they aren’t on slowclap (yet) it will just route them through, and if they sign up later your referral link will still work.

This is just another way that using old fashioned web standards in a creative way can enable slowclap to operate across the decentralized open web and still enable the sort of mutual benefit from shared community building that the platform is meant for. I hope you all take advantage of it!