The Curious Case of People Who Only Clap Once

Even though my posts are in general getting quite a lot of claps and I’m happy with the response on average, about 40% of those who clapped gave only one single clap — this phenomenon raised my curiosity.

There are many one-clap readers on Medium!

I couldn’t help but notice there is a large percentage of readers on Medium who give posts a single clap. This trend is so obvious that I took the time and calculated the percentage of one-clap readers for my most recent 10 posts.

Here are the results, sorted from the post with the lowest percentage to the post with the highest percentage of single claps they received:

31% Amazon KDP: How to Self-Publish a Book-Part 9 32% Don’t Edit Your Writing to Death! 35% Using NaNoWriMo In a Different Way 36% Why Medium Discriminates Against International Writers? 41% The Worst Things Cannot Be Written 42% How Do I Deal With Depression 45% Stop Asking People for Feedback 46% How I Overcame Cancer With No Medical Help 49% Top Self-Publishing Platform — Pronoun 50% How the Google Memo Guy Became My Ultimate Hero

The results made me curious and I tried to come up with plausible explanations for this. I’d really appreciate your insights and suggestions too.

How and why could this be?

Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

1. People do not know they can give anywhere from 1 to 50 claps — I’m pretty sure some of my readers fall into this group. The concept of clapping introduced by Medium is, after all, unique. On all other social media and blog platforms you either like a post or not. Your Friends @ Medium and Medium Staff only recently came up with this new concept, and not everyone might be aware of it yet.
2. One-clap people prefer a simple binary system to having too many options — it’s way more simple to either like or not like a post than having to decide just how many claps out of 50 you are going to give. 50, when you think of it, is a pretty big number. Too big for the human mind to easily handle the multitude of options it gives to the reader. This group thus simply ignores the new system and prefers to stay in the good, old, simple binary world — giving either one clap or none.
3. They read Medium on their smartphones and haven’t updated the app yet — this is, actually, what happened to me. I was one of the one-clap people, for I was only able to clap once until I kicked myself in the butt and upgraded that app. I needed to find the time and will to do that, and we all know how easy it is to just keep postponing such things into infinity.
4. Something else— now what might that be? I created a one question survey to find out.

If you have the habit of clapping only once, please take this short survey to help me understand this phenomenon. Your answers are most appreciated!

(Update December 6, 2017 — The Survey is closed now and I published a report on the results).

What does a single clap mean?

OK, so let’s say that many will respond with ‘Other’ (and hopefully fill-in the blank). Now if that is so, what does giving a single clap mean? What is the reader saying by giving 1 clap out of 50?

• That the post was worth reading but only just barely?
• That the reader reads a lot and doesn’t have the time to clap more than once?
• That they appreciate the effort but think you could do way better than that?

Any ideas?

Mateja started to write short stories at the age of ten and later became a freelance writer, radio personality, and explorer of the inner worlds. Her life resembles a roller coaster ride full of ups and downs and some pretty wild turns. Among other things, her car was destroyed by tanks, and she survived several brushes with death. She graduated in psychology from Arizona State University and is deep into the weird. Connect with Mateja on LinkedIn.