Tap to send a heart, hold to send a token
Appreciation and payment are not the same gesture, and asking one button to be both is how you end up with neither.
In short
On Generated Worlds the thank control on an episode does two things: a tap sends a free heart, which any viewer can send including one with an empty wallet, and a press-and-hold sends a token from the viewer's wallet to the creator of that episode. The distinction keeps a free gesture free and makes paying deliberate.
A tipping button on a video is usually one of two disappointing things. Either it costs money, so most viewers never touch it and the creator hears silence from everyone who liked the episode but did not pay; or it is free, in which case it is a like, and the people who would happily have paid have nowhere to do so.
We split it by gesture rather than by button. A tap is a heart and costs nothing. A press held for about half a second sends a token, and on screen a coin leaves the wallet and flies to the studio's picture, so the difference between the two gestures is visible at the moment it happens rather than explained in a tooltip afterwards.
01Why the heart had to be free, and had to be first
- A viewer with no tokens still has something to say, and a creator learns which episode moved people, not only which episode people could afford to respond to.
- A signed-out viewer can send one. Requiring an account to say thank you is asking for paperwork in exchange for a compliment.
- The paid gesture is harder to do by accident than a tap, which is the correct way round for anything that spends money.
02Where it goes
Hearts are recorded per episode, so they answer a question at the scale a creator actually works at — which episode, not which series. Tokens sent this way go to the creator of the episode, on the same 80% share as anything else sold here.
What it does not do
A heart is a message, not a vote: it does not change what the feed shows anyone, and it is no substitute for the retention curves when a creator wants to know whether an episode held people. Affection and attention are different things, and only one of them is measured.
Questions
- How do viewers tip a short drama creator on Generated Worlds?
- By holding the thank control on the episode, which sends a token from their wallet to the creator of that episode. A single tap sends a free heart instead, and works with an empty wallet or no account.
- Does the creator get all of a tip?
- Creators keep 80% of what is spent on their work here, tips included, after payment processing. We have published the split rather than a figure for what anyone has earned.
Keep reading
- We removed the account from the checkout
Viewers can now pay for the next episode, or the rest of a series, without creating an account first. A password comes afterwards, by email, if they want one.
- An episode editor inside the series page
Creators can now trim the start and end of an episode and crop it to vertical from the series page, without re-exporting or re-uploading the file.
All posts from the Generated Worlds Tech Blog.