What is the opposite of clapping?

This week, Medium announced that it intended to pay at least some contributors something based on the number of “claps” (which used to be “hearts,” which were essentially “likes”) that a contribution generated.
This is a terrible idea from a wonderful platform I have adored since its inception and the reason I canceled my paid membership today.
Succinctly put, we shouldn’t measure the value of media by the reaction it elicits. While that seems blindingly obvious to anyone who has toiled for newspapers as long as I have, there are apparently those among us who consider any other value proposition a dispiriting holdover of legacy thinking that is dragging our business into the toilet. (Hello, Ev Williams!)
This “claps = value” concept devalues the slow clap we should be giving serious journalism. Take this insightful analysis of what is happening today in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It will never be applauded as much as this YouTube video, which I literally found by googling “dumbest thing on YouTube.” At my newspaper and many, many others, we report on the city administrator’s salary and from the sewer authority meetings and about the school board’s tax proposal not because it is popular to do so, but because doing so is important to the continuation of the democracy. An uninformed electorate is capable of unfortunate things, as you may have noticed.
Furthermore, this clapping thing will only lead us further into our own hollow echo chambers. There is plenty of clapping going on at the president’s post-campaign campaign rallies and within the segmented audiences of MSNBC, FOX and CNN. Giving the people what they want isn’t that hard, and it’s rarely enlightening.
Now, please hold my high horse while I jump off. Every day I balance the juicy with the journalism. I don’t mean to suggest that I would never be caught dead pandering to my readership’s baser instincts. I have done so repeatedly. And I appreciate the spirit here. Medium says this pay-per-clap business is part of its ongoing experiment. It’s great that Medium is trying to find a way to compensate creators and it’s true that the advertising model of the print days is at the very least challenging in the digital environment.
But let’s not build a business model around a popularity contest and call it anything other than that. To my mind, Medium is merely following the regional newspapers that long ago traded their unique standing in the community for so many clicks. Or, in this case, claps.
My two cents. Which is more than I expect to ever earn posting to Medium.
