Member-only story

A Plea for Authentic Engagement on Medium

The hidden cost of mindless clapping

Raahil Modi 🌿
Dancing Elephants Press
3 min readSep 7, 2024

--

Photo by Guillermo Latorre on Unsplash

An important concern in the Medium ecosystem I’ve noticed as a writer is readers (and other writers) clapping for articles based on titles, often, without reading them. Even though that may seem innocent, or even helpful, it has unintended consequences, which impact both authors as well readers.

Let’s understand why this matters and how we can work towards a more authentic community.

Firstly, Drive-by Clapping Sucks!

Readers can clap for an article without reading it. That’s absurd.

These statistics are meant to let the writers know their audience and also Medium in suggesting the content by its own algorithm.

Claps are there to let the author know they did a good job on the article — not for being popular (with the no. of claps) or agreeing with someone. But when you just hand them out like candy, they no longer hold significance to writers.

A greater focus on shallow engagement encourages clickbait titles over substantial content leading to misaligned incentives.

Readers who cannot engage with content before clapping, miss out on valuable insights and viewpoints — they may not be interested in reading it—that’s fine — then why clap in…

--

--

Dancing Elephants Press
Dancing Elephants Press

Published in Dancing Elephants Press

Let’s jump out of the box together. Supporting connection, positivity, joy, hope, caring for each other and the environment around us. New beginnings for this Universe and Humanity. Builds on providing emotional and mental support, welcome spirituality and open minds. Dance.

Raahil Modi 🌿
Raahil Modi 🌿

Written by Raahil Modi 🌿

Explorer of life's endless possibilities.

Responses (17)