The thing about Claps…

Karthick Thoppe
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

I’ve been following rest of the Medium community’s thoughts and feelings about the newly introduced “Clap” instead of likes.

My view on this is — since physiologically, a clap is to encourage certain action, let’s say when watching someone doing stand up comedy or singing in their unique voice etc. While, “like”s are the for the “content” of that action, let’s say a good old Tech blog about Bitcoin and where is it is going, a good Medium article on claps (I know!).

Facebook does this differently, such as liking a specific post, feed or message while letting the users to include detailed comments which might include their encouragement along with their views as they see it, and arguably they include claps too. Also, clap is not limited while like is just liking something or not. Likes are measured to arrive at a Yes/No decision point and while claps can be used to measure something but it is just that.

I’ve been a victim of this since the Claps were introduced. Earlier I use to like a article or blog here and I’d like it but now I am hesitating to Clap, mostly because though I like the article another Medium user / publication wrote, I don’t want to clap them, since it is not natural to think in that flow, so I don’t clap.

Bottom line, if Medium were to have both Likes (or heart?) AND Claps, it would be a better platform for people to express themselves. One might argue that Like and Clap must be mutually exclusive and Medium business team can decide to understand their user base better to provide amenable feature that is common ground to all its readers and writers.

It would be interesting to see how many would like this post in their “mind” and how many would virtually clap this post!

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Karthick Thoppe
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