Claps Are a Horrible Way to Measure Performance
When 72 claps are better than 20,000 you need a different metric
Here’s the problem with claps. Not everyone uses them, and even the people who use them don’t use them the same way.
If I like an article, I give it 50 claps — the max. Why not show that writer some love? Of course I think that way. I’m a writer myself. I love the little dopamine rush I get when I see that someone liked a story I wrote.
But a lot of people give 1 clap. And I get it. There’s a time commitment to 50 claps — a little more than 11 seconds, in my unofficial experiment. Sitting there watching the little number climb to 50 is boring.
Some people have a sliding scale of claps they give, depending on how much they liked the article. As a writer, it’s never clear to me why someone gives me eight claps, or 12.
- Did they like the article, but only a little bit?
- Do they just clap if they read through to the end, whether or not they liked it?
- Did they plan to go to 50 claps and get distracted?
And of course, there are lots of people who don’t clap at all. Maybe they don’t know they can. Maybe they don’t care.
