What is this 👏 thing?

And why can’t I do it to myself?

My life has gotten crazy over the past few months. I had to take a break from writing on Medium for a little while. I come back, and suddenly, everyone is clapping!

And there are articles about this clapping. I don’t care, I didn’t read them. All I know, is that when my articles sucked, I could at least recommend myself. One little heart. From me. Because if you don’t love yourself, no one will.

But now, I can’t do anything to my finger dribble. There’s nothing but a little greyed out icon of hands clapping. And I can’t clap for myself! I mean, I can clap in real life, but no one else will know. And, if you clap for yourself, and no one can hear you do it, did you really clap at all?

Of course, I could go to a crowded coffee shop and sit there on my laptop and clap at it loudly until other people notice, but that’s a disproportionate amount of effort just to let other people know I clapped for myself.

This clapping thing is a real bummer, too, because it’s a lot harder for me to know when an article really sucks but a few really lame people liked it a lot. I went to a lame article and held down the “clap” button for as long as I could, just to see how many claps it would let me do! And do you know how many claps that is?

It’s a lot. 50. To the untrained eye or reader, you’d think 50 people took the time out of their day to slap Medium’s “like” button. And for every person who bothered to do that, at least 5 others read it! This is a popular article. So all it takes is 10 really bum people to 👏 for an article about how the Earth is flat and the moon is hollow and BAM! It looks like 500 people liked an article about the Moon actually being a government control center operated in part by aliens on a site that promotes ‘quality’ ideas.

Why 50 claps, anyway? Is there some university-backed study out there that shows that people’s arms get physically tired after they’ve clapped 50 times? Do people normally clap at articles? Is that a thing? Why don’t I see people clapping at their newspapers on their morning commute?

Oh, how I know my words will fall on deaf ears. Especially now that I cannot even clap for myself, even I will not hear them. And especially especially because I am reading them. But Medium, if you are going to make clap like a seal for articles, then at least give me tomatos as well. And give me 50 tomatos. I want to throw tomatos at articles. I want people to get notifications from me seeing I tossed a 🍅 at them. I want Medium covered in tomato sauce by the time I’ve finished getting through with it.

If you hate this article, toss a 🍅. Don’t you dare 👏 for it.