My preditions (I am batting 100% correct on SuperBowls):

The hackers who clapped for each other without reading the stories will need a new way to game the system. Since the new algorithm is “read time” based, and few people read long stories, they will switch to a new tactic. Publishing 50 hiakus per day. They open each other’s hiakus in seperate tabs and then close them. Each one gets a one minute read. That’s 50 minutes per day. Bingo! Rolling in dough! Or they open a story and leve it open for a while then scroll to the end. Bingo! 5 minutes! Sadly, people will always look for a way to get paid without doing any actual work.

Everyone else will continue do the same thing they did before. Write great and not-so-great stories, and likely earn about the same thing as before. If someone writes a short poem (or micro-fiction, or humor), and the reader ponders every word and takes time to highlight things, that will probably earn the same (or likely more) than giving 50 claps did.

Or I could be totally wrong. That is usually a pretty safe bet.