My new ‘claps’ policy
By: Badri Sunderarajan
Tags: Medium, Product, Medium Claps, Design, You Tell Me

My new ‘claps’ policy

I’ll be clapping more than once, after all

When Medium first released their ‘claps’ feature, I wasn’t very sure if I’d like it or not. Claps seemed a bit of a vague way to express appreciation for something. And there was always the big question: how many times should I clap?

Clapping once

Medium, as I quickly found out, weights your claps depending on your average. If you usually clap once while I clap ten times on average, then your claps will have ten times as much weight as mine.

That gave me a convenient loophole to get out: I could pretend that claps were still recommends, and clap only once.

I wouldn’t have to worry too much about ‘how much’ to clap, that way. And, for the few articles that especially resonated with me, I could simply hold down the button for a little longer.

Clapping again

That was when I found another way in which claps are useful.

The old ‘❤️️ recommend’ buttons, though you may not notice it, were actually used not for one purpose but for two:

To recommend an article To acknowledge a comment

This could be a carry-over from Facebook, where the convention is to ‘👍 like’ a comment, if you want to acknowledge it but don’t really have anything to say. The problem is that, in Medium, each response is its own story. So, if I recommend a comment to say “thanks”, it gets the same positive response as if I recommend a very deep and inspiring story.

I mean, I like your comment and all, but it wasn’t that good either!

I’m sure, there are algorithms to handle all that, but it just seems nicer to follow the rule: clap once for comments, clap more for articles.

Clapping more

It was only much later that I recognised the true purpose of claps. For paying members of Medium, it’s not just a way to share your article, it’s also a way to control where your funds go.

Each member gets a fixed budget, which is paid to authors of members-only articles. How much each article gets depends, among other things, on how much the member has ‘👏 applauded’ it. To put it simply: the more you clap for a piece, the larger the share of your money it gets.

Of course, it’s not only claps that count. The revenue-giving algorithm takes many other factors (how many people have read the article? how much time have they spent on it)to figure out the overall ‘value’ of a piece. But the claps factor surely helps a lot in deciding.

Over time, I’ve begun ‘extra-clapping’ more often. Instead of just one or two claps, I actually hold the button a bit depending on how much I liked the article.

If it actually helps, then why not?

Clapping better

Clapping is not a calculated thing. I don’t decide how to clap; I just go by the feeling. And, I think that’s how claps are meant to be. You don’t sit and decide “okay, I’ll give 23 claps to this person and 6 to that one”. You don’t say how you liked the article. You express it.

But don’t stop there. Just because you’ve expressed your feeling doesn’t mean you can say it as well. When claps first came out, I wondered if it would make the number of responses go down. People may feel they’ve expressed themselves enough.

So, don’t stop at clapping. Say how you feel as well, by writing a response.

Which article will you do that to? Perhaps you could start with the one you’ve just finished reading ;-)