There are at least other two things to think about.
1. What Medium tries to achieve is not bringing the old paper to screen, but Medium wants to give the right value to the wrote words. So, the comparison with the book is very nice, but we can’t apply that to every feature here.
2. There are a lot of articles which aren’t good: I don’t heart them. There are articles which are good: I heart them. There are articles which are really special: the only thing I can do is to heart them like I do with every other article which I like just a little bit. The applause changes that. I can give just 1 to an acceptable article, more to a very good one, a lot more to a special one. I can even give applauses for just a paragraph instead of highlighting it all or being forced to write something.
Those things are useful for the point 1: Medium wants to give the right value to the wrote words. If every reader give me 50 claps, my piece of text is something very very very good. Same claps, with 1 clap for user just means that I have a bigger audience, but I’m not so good.
This change gives a lot of useful data to Medium, which I hope will be used to bring us more valid content.
I don’t agree with you, but I really like how you analyzed this feature. In a heart yes/no environment, I couldn’t have hearted your writing, as it doesn’t fit my opinions. But now I feel comfortable to leave at least one applause, because of the quality of what I read here.
I think many others will do (immediately or not) this way, and I think it will be better.
You could start by giving just 1 applause, like if it was an heart. When you’ll feel the urge to give more than one applause, simply do that, and in a very little time you will know how many applauses to give each time.
P.S. I don’t know if this is a typical Italian thing, but it is very common to say things like: “20 minuti di applausi” (n minutes of clapping) when someone writes something truly good, so it isn’t so strange to me to clap (virtually) for a written text
