‘Clapping’? Really?

Allison Washington
Aug 9, 2017 · 1 min read

Aaannd…Medium makes another poorly-considered change without discussing it with their user base. Well done.

  1. Whilst it’s nice to have Medium put something at the end of a story to encourage interaction, many thousands of us already have such footer messages, which refer to ‘hearts’. Now there are thousands and thousands of stupid, misleading footers on Medium. Thanks.
  2. Evidently you can ‘clap’ more than once to show just how very very much you like a thing. I ‘clapped’ on a trivial message 35 times before I gave up. Yea, there’s sure no way to game this system… *sheesh*
    If ‘claps’ rate the same as the previous ‘hearts’ (and they do seem to), this will simply bury all existing work and hide it from the algorithm. Well done.

Please ‘clap’ this post until your finger hurts.

— Allison


I make a spare living doing this. You can support my work and get draft previews and my frequent ‘Letters Home’ for less than the cost of a coffee.

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Journalist & essayist. Reporting from Cairo.

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