Should We Give 50 Claps to Every Story We Read on Medium?

A follow-up article to I don’t leave a single clap anymore.

I think it’s fair to say that claps have a psychological impact on us as writers. I always feel mean giving less than 50 claps but it’s a way of offering feedback to the writer and I don’t want to devalue the impact of the articles when I do feel motivated to give 50 claps.

In my humble opinion, writers deserve a clap just for having the courage to take the risk of publishing. It’s not easy to send your creative work out into the world.

I got a lot of comments on that article. From people still under the impression that Medium pays per clap (they used to) to people who had no idea (like me at the beginning of my Medium journey) that they could give more than one clap.

In fact, there have been so many comments and opinions on this that I decided to try to track down the official Medium line. My interpretation of everything that I can find is that claps are mostly for interaction between reader and writer, but it’s not that straightforward.

No.

Claps are also used to rank stories. The algorithm evaluates how many claps an individual user usually gives when calculating the ranking.

So, if I always give the same amount of claps, whether it’s 1 or 50, the algorithm will interpret my response as evaluating all those articles as equally good or bad. Presumably, this would mean that my claps would become irrelevant.

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