49 claps and not a single clap more! Take that.
Having spent some of my career working with rating systems and psychologists who have nothing better to do than understand how people rate things, I have to say that the Medium people (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) might have asked around a tad before introducing this system.
Claps are lovely. They are human. And above all, they have no similarity to Evil Evil Facebook. But as a means of reflecting quality…not so much. Engaging users? Maybe. Inflating the impression of volume — mos’ def. All of the newbie Mediumers (that’s what us late-2016 old-timers call ourselves), all of them are getting clapped on, without any work.
I sure as hell hope they adjust all the several hundred Hearts I earned the old-fashioned way (when an article I wrote got randomly linked on Hacker News and got 100k views in 4 hours). Statistically, I would now have 25x more claps. That’s like 236 x 25 claps.
