Medium claps Dichotomy!
My emotional journey realizing the difference between Claps & Fans.
“Getting published in a publication is the most important step in your Medium journey,” I read somewhere. At least for beginners, it is true indeed. Along with this, I read many “getting started with Medium” themed articles, yet I never ended up on an article explaining the difference between claps and fans.
In order to get started on Medium, the first step is entertaining an emotional roller coaster, irrespective of what you are seeking from writing on Medium, especially for writers with almost zero prior experience.
Here’s my journey
Before submitting my article to a publication, the most claps my articles received were ‘six’, and rightfully so. Especially, when you don’t share your articles with your friends to sustain your anonymity. But less attention didn’t bother me much in the beginning.
But then I started looking for publications that accept amateur writers. Surprisingly there are a bunch of them who take writers irrespective of the writing quality, just to get the volume to their publication. Not that I am complaining. They turned out to be a blessing for “writers” like me, who are still struggling to make the grammar rules stick to their active consciousness.
Henceforth, I submitted a random article to one such publication. It got approved and published.
The first time I checked the published posts, it had 50 claps.
Let’s use “overjoyed” as an adjective to downplay my feeling in that moment. (Otherwise, I would sound like a child — which I am.)The second time I checked that post, it had 100 claps.
Now I have to be honest, despite being suspicious about the clap count being in a multiple of 50, I was in a dancing mood.
The human temptation of celebrating too early
This was an unexpected validation for someone with an inferiority complex. Suddenly, I was telling myself, “I can do this”. Medium is for me. I can grow, evolve and quit my shitty job and be one of those people who earn a thousand bucks off Medium. (Note: In my country, that’s more than necessary and sufficient to survive.)
Almost all of those “getting started with Medium” articles explicitly say ‘not to see the stats at an early stage of your writing career on Medium’. I was at that early stage, hence I obliged like an obedient kid. Which allowed my bubble to last for about — a day. Then I saw my stats.
7 views. 5 Reads. 3 Fans. 100 claps.
My feelings slumped from a high state of joy to… well, there were a number of things I felt at that moment. I felt gutted, cheated, embarrassed, and unworthy. In a sense, I was furious with that publication and with those people who clapped 50 times for a post.
Fortunately, all these feelings lasted just for a brief period and I realized that those people didn’t have any foul or selfish intentions behind this. If anything, they were being supportive of me. One of the fans of my story was the publisher himself, and now if I look back at it, I feel thankful to him for boosting my post (and confidence) with clap count.
The psychology behind clap count
The fact is that most of the readers are unaware of the difference between clap and fan. (At least I was.) Claps are subconsciously treated as a “like” 👍 button on Facebook or heart ❤️ on Instagram or an upvote on Reddit.
This naivety (of readers) helps writers accrue more credibility to their article. Someone unaware of the fact that they can offer more than one clap would eventually think — 1.2 k claps means 1.2k people liked it. A subconscious credibility association with the article and just another reason to go through that post — classic herd mentality at work.
Anyway, this naïve experience ended up teaching me a lot. We all wanna feel worthy. More than that, the process of information dissemination (at what point of your learning journey, you understood the process) is very important. Especially, since the “implied” logics of every platform (and life disciplines) are different.
Thanks for reading.
