Dharmesh Shah, I think your idea of quotas is interesting, but I fear that’s pretty much going to have the same effect as the “objective” results we see with liking photos on Facebook for contests.
Adding these granular measures never seems to make sense; it’s the same problem that plagues five star review systems. We can never agree as a population on what the definition of each point on a sliding scale is. This is just an opinion, but this problem probably gets even more egregious when the “sliding-scale” isn’t a scale at all as it is here with claps.
If I don’t give you as many claps because my standards have changed since reading additional articles does that mean I didn’t like your writing as much? Not necessarily.
If the scale isn’t set, the user has to go back to old pieces they’ve read and edit their “claps” in order to maintain their classification of just how good a piece really was. In practice, no one will actually do this, but it shows why the data that comes from this will be extremely hard to use. I understand they’re planning to use average claps as the metric per user, but if my usage patterns are inconsistent or my definition of the number of appropriate claps changes, this metric again becomes less valuable.
Again in practice, nobody considers their “mean clap count” prior to clapping.
