There's no reason to have the "claps" -- they could easily measure engagement without the readers having to actively do anything (visits to page/time on site, etc.). This reeks of a gimmick/someone trying to do something for their MBA thesis, vs. actually trying to get authors fairly paid.
There's no way that affiliate links can pay the bills for publishers; numbers don't ad up (otherwise everyone would do it, and no one does -- well, actually, there's extremely limited situations where it works in some consumer corners, but those situations are limited and the total amount of revenue is also very limited). And how much extra traffic are you really going to refer? Ads are sold on the thousand -- $X per thousand (consumer can be cents up to maybe $8, B2B much higher). So even if you referred 200 people that's not even worth any effort. Unfortunately, if you're not going buy a subscription, register for a paper or click on an ad, you're probably not worth anything to the site anyhow.
But they would not make any money via ads from me anyways. I never click ads unless I do it accidentally by mis-clicking. So even with disabled adblocker I'd just lower their CPC (cost per click). So it costs them nothing to let me read their website with adblocker and there a tiny possible upside from me referring more traffic to them.
Either way I assume people like me are a fast growing part of millennial population so their business model based on ads is doomed to fail anyways.
Click throughs aren't necessary for advertising to work. A lot of it is to prime your subconscious, or strengthen associations. This is why Coca Cola doesn't care if you click through. Same with car companies. When most Americans think of soda, they think of coke. If you prime their subconscious to associate soda positively with thirst, and soda is similarly associated with Coke, you've got them.
I love this, but I worry about longevity -- if we convert all our code snippets to this, and then this dies, all the older blog posts become useless. You'd be surprised how many reads even 5+ year old blog posts can get.
One of the nice things about the way we do things with RunKit embeds (https://runkit.com/docs/embed) is that the code lives in your site, not on ours. The API generates the embed the same way something like highlight.js generates syntax-colored code on your site. That means if we're ever down, your site gracefully degrades to a not-runnable snippet, as opposed to merely disappearing like this seems to or with embedded gists.
Let's break down the reality of this situation as it currently stands:
1) You can't say what you want at work, period (there are no first amendment protections at work, just from the government). The person who posted the memo was naive and this memo from the CEO is corporate bullspeak to look good for outside PR. That's all this is, and if you take it for anything more you're also naive. For all intents and purposes it means nothing.
2) The company might be trying to make women feel more welcome by having the statement from the new diversity officer and the CEO, but I can tell you as a woman the LAST place I'd want to get a job right now is Google -- everyone is going to look at you like you only got your job because you're female; it's going to be extremely hard to get people to take you seriously. That's why, if you're going to hire only for diversity (not that I recommend it), do it in silence, don't tell the world, as it only backfires against those same employees you're bringing in.
3) If Google really wanted to get more females and minorities in its rank it should be looking at why it focuses so highly on only top rank schools (IF TRUE: MAY NOT BE-- SEE DISCUSSION BELOW) -- there's plenty of great, smart people constantly overlooked by Google because they can't see past their own biases in this area, which some would argue is a bigger barrier to diversity at Google than straight hiring by gender and race alone.
Only going to reply to your last point, this isn't my experience at all with Google. I work in SV, and get contacted by an internal recruiter at Google a couple times a year. What school did I go to? None. Ok, I have a certificate from the Defense Language Institute, but no degree. So I'm not sure this is a problem.
And you may be absolutely right -- I'm going off what I've heard from young people anecdotally out of college who say they weren't given a second look because they weren't from MIT or Cal Tech. But perhaps that's only for entry-level positions, or perhaps my information is just plain wrong.
The site as it stands doesn't, as looking at the site currently has plenty of jobs that requires passing a criminal background check. It appears this site is more idea than execution at this point.
