Do You Have a System for Claps?

And do you even need one?

In the beginning, clapping equated to payments.

I didn’t experience this as I only joined Medium after the changes to the payment system. But I understand that stories were paid according to the number of claps. Claps meant something back then.

You wanted 50 claps when a reader read and enjoyed your story.

When Medium, changed its payment system to the number of reads. Medium didn’t do anything about the claps. They just left the claps there. (I know).

What To Do with the Claps?

When I started on Medium, I didn’t know what to do about the claps.

I thought claps were like FB likes and I would leave one clap.

Then I found that I was insulting people without realizing that I had been doing this.

But I still didn’t know what to do about the claps.

And felt awkward about how many times to clap.

I’ve now stopped leaving just one clap. (Apologies to all those I unknowingly insulted).

But sometimes, I was leaving 5, then 10, and sometimes 50.

It didn’t feel right to clap 50 times for every article.

Here’s my System for Giving Claps.

I give 5 claps if I started to read.

10 if I got halfway.

20 if I finished it.

30 if it really engaged me and

50 if I thought wow, I wish I had written that piece.

How To Clap the Easy Way

To give a clap, you just hold down the clap button and the number of claps will keep increasing. I didn’t know this. I kept hitting the clap button, over and over to clap. This took a long time. I didn’t realize how easy it was to clap. Maybe that was just me, I don’t know.

Maybe Medium will develop a system so that we all understand claps once again, but until then, this is what I will try to use.

What system do you have for claps?

Thank you for reading.

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