Overthinking It

What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Oh, my Stars and Thumbs… does it even matter?

I’m not sure what our collective obsession with ratings and rankings and “Likes” is all about. I know that my only real interest in the algorithms is to not have my writing stirred and churned down to the bottom of the swirly paint can, to watch my words languish and die in the sticky sludge of eggshell obscurity before anyone can read and recommend them to friends the old fashioned way: word-of-mouth advertising.

Some people, though, live or die by those ratings. “Stingy bastard,” they think when you clap just once. Or they become so insecure that they contemplate disemboweling themselves with a fountain pen, and resolve never to write again.

I try not to overthink it, and I will definitely keep writing — in fact, don’t bother saying, “Write on!” or “Keep on writing!” to encourage a writer, because their first thought will be, “Just try to stop me!” I also know, though, that I am weirdly competitive, and I will admit that a single clap stings a little.

The psychology of rating, and receiving ratings, is fascinating. It also varies from one culture to another. In the United States, for example, a five-star rating generally equates to the grading system everyone’s familiar with from school: 1 star means you failed, 2 equates to a dismal “D”, 3 is merely average or massively mediocre, 4 is an above-average “B” — “atta boy, try just a smidge harder, you’ll get there!”, and 5 is pretty much reserved for anyone who can walk on water. In Germany, the notion that “nobody’s perfect, therefore I never give anything 5 stars” seems to be prevalent. An “average” 3 is not as harsh, to a German, as it seems to an American; you have to be really good to eke a 4 out of most Germans, in my experience, and a 3 is more like an American 4.

The “pity 4’s and 5's” given by little old ladies who still believe that “if you have nothing nice to say, you should say nothing at all,” are readily offset by the 1’s and 2’s given out by people who are just having a bad day, lashing out with anonymous hostility, thinking no one will notice or care.

Consider, too, “Net Promoter Score” or “NPS.” Some serious study went into this metric, which says that when asked, on a scale of 0 to 10, “How likely are you to recommend [a thing], with 0 being ‘not at all likely’ and 10 being ‘extremely likely,’” anything less than a 6 means you suck. Tired of taking those surveys? Kill ’em with a 6. No, please don’t. Just understand that anything less than a 9 or a 10 can get products and projects canceled, result in people getting fired or losing pay, and cause C-suite execs to die of a stroke or heart attack. Be kind.

If you’ve ever wondered why a service technician or salesman has coached you to give a 9 or a 10 on such a survey, now you know. Though it should never be used as a punitive metric, some companies do use it that way, and such “coaching” is cheating, which renders the whole thing a lot less useful.

This is not how most of us think, when we rate things, is it? I once asked my son — who knew nothing of NPS — to rate the laptop we’d bought him for college. He gave it a 6.

It’s important to know the following, though: We bought it for him specifically to do schoolwork, and we actively sought to discourage him from spending his study time on online gaming. It was a good, low-end laptop and we’d bought two of them — one for him, and one for me to use when writing. For the purchasers’ purposes, I’d have given that thing a 10.

Once he understood NPS, my son gave that laptop an 8. I think he just wanted to register his displeasure with me, given the reasoning, I explained behind the purchase of that model. An 8 neither hurts nor helps; the formula takes all ratings into account, then subtracts the percentage of 0–6 ratings from the percentage of 9–10 ratings to arrive at the overall NPS number (a number that can range from -100 to +100). He did admit that it was a perfectly good laptop and he would be extremely likely to recommend it to a budget-conscious friend for schoolwork.

I think this story explains very well why it’s important to clap more than once, for anything you read on Medium:

Imagine giving the performance of your life and, at the end, everyone in the audience politely claps once, twice, or three times, and then: silence.

Maybe you don’t care because you’re just performing for you, but for most writers, baring our souls requires vulnerability and clapping is the needed-validation that we’ve been heard in some meaningful way.

I tend to think, “Well, they just don’t understand how Medium works,” but I think that the applause for performance analogy up there is a good one. When do you know when to stop clapping? When it feels right. But would you ever just clap once at any performance — even a kid’s recital?

And here, we have our answer:

As for “overthinking it,” I’ll be the first to admit that I do, when I’m the one giving them out:

And I’m not alone — this story gives some insight into Medium members’ understanding of what claps mean, and shows just how many of them don’t even realize it’s possible to give more than one per story!

You can imagine, surely, that with each reader having their own completely subjective and personal rationale for how they hand out their budget of “claps,” it’s an almost meaningless metric? Except for this one clue:

“When ranking stories,” says Medium, “our system will evaluate claps users give out on an individual basis, assessing their applause for a particular post relative to the number of claps they typically give.”

So if you give 50 claps to everything you read, you might just as well have given each thing a single clap. You should probably settle on some sort of relative rating system — whether it’s 1–3 claps, or increments of 5 or 10, with anything less than 40 being “you suck” — it really doesn’t matter so long as you give your favorites a higher number than the stories that leave you feeling “meh.” And maybe give at least 3, so you won’t be known as one of those “heartless, one-clap monsters.”

Egads. We are all overthinking it. Let’s just get back to writing, reading, and having conversations.

Break a leg, writers. Try not to cry or disembowel yourself over the single claps — it’s bad for a good fountain pen nib, that. And remember, there’s always the next performance.