Why You Should Care About the Difference Between Claps and Likes
There is good reason to care about how the virtual world we inhabit is designed and constructed. A cliché, I know, but I see a lot of evidence that this is true, so I wanted to share some of my observations on one of the most ubiquitous aspects of online media — the “like”.
Ever since I discovered Medium, I’ve been very curious about the clap system. At first, I treated them as likes — I didn’t see any reason to assume otherwise.
You can imagine my astonishment when, by pure chance, I tapped on the clap button twice, only to see a flashy +2. I tapped again — +3. I felt like a kid who’d just discovered a new toy. I kept tapping, faster and faster, until I got to the +50 and could tap no more.
Immediately my clapping high subsided, I thought, “This is really cool. But why did they do it?”.
Some time later, I discovered that it had a lot to do with how the Partner Program worked and membership fees were distributed among writers. However, as I am prone to doing, immediately after answering one question I asked another: “What are they trying to achieve?”. Now I think I finally have a potential answer to this question.
Even though claps are not used to calculate earning for writers anymore, they are still valuable feedback, for both writers and readers. (As a side-note, it seems like reading time is the only thing that matters for calculating earnings for writers according to Medium’s FAQ.)
Writers can look at claps to determine engagement in their stories, and readers (often subconsciously) use claps to inform their impression of a story and whether they want to read it or not. But there is more than one way to assess the quality of a story.
Claps for Fairness
A month ago I finally started writing on Medium, and I was shocked to see one of my first stories receiving 74 claps!
I thought that was crazy. So I clicked on the number next to the clap icon in order to dispel my disbelief. I was even more shocked to realize that all 74 claps came from just two people!
Surprisingly, this actually made me appreciate the claps even more. There are two people that seem to have genuinely enjoyed reading my piece. At least enough to spend a couple of second tapping the clap button.
Personally, I would rather have fewer readers (or clappers?), if it meant that those readers enjoyed my content more, and genuinely found something meaningful in it.
What I found most interesting was that I instinctively assumed the claps were from 74 different people, and that unless you look into it, two articles with the same number of claps will appear the same, no matter how many people clapped. This is something likes cannot achieve.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s assume the number of claps roughly determines the quality of an article. In reality, the relationship is probably not as straightforward, but let’s accept that for the sake of this mental exercise.
Take two stories, each of which has the same number of claps, say 200. However, one story was clapped by 200 people (with 1 clap each) and the other one was clapper by 20 people (with 10 claps each).
The first story has a lot of fans, but the second story seems to have fewer fans who enjoyed the story more. (Again, a gross oversimplification, but bear with me.)
If Medium didn’t allow for multiple claps from each user, then the latter story would only have had 20 claps, because readers wouldn’t have had a way to express their appreciation for the story beyond a single clap — the equivalent of a like in social media.
But there is reason to believe that a story that attracts mild interest from many readers is not necessarily better, or worse, than a story that attracts greater interest from a small number of readers.
With that in mind, I believe claps are designed as a way to account for the quality of fans, not just their quantity. In other words, giving equal weight to writers with fewer, more dedicated fans, and those with a larger number of less dedicated fans.
In doing so, claps introduce a degree of fairness, and allow for multiple ways to receive credit, in addition to getting out in front of as many people as possible.
Claps for Transparency
There is a lot to be said about the fidelity of social interaction online.
Big social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) often rely on likes as the basic unit of communication for their users’ attitudes and impressions.
Now think about a social interaction in real life — there is so much more going on! Even when someone expresses a basic form of approval (which is what likes are supposed to emulate), there is also body language, tone, expression, volume, and so many other factors that are part of that social interaction.
Interactions in the real world provide much more information for assessing and drawing conclusions. That’s what I mean by higher fidelity. Likes only provide a single binary piece of information.
(Yes, I am ignoring things like Facebook reactions other than likes. I think those are a sizeable improvement, but have decided to ignore them for this conversation as they are not ubiquitous.)
Ideas like this one about the difference between online and real-world social interaction have become a big topic of conversation recently. Cal Newport tackled this topic masterfully in Digital Minimalism.
In contrast to likes, claps provide higher fidelity of interaction — they are able to convey more information about the attitude of fans towards a piece of writing or a comment.
To put this another way, they offer more transparency about what users are thinking and the type of engagement stories receive. They make the platform and the people on it seem a bit more real (although only marginally).
I believe the difference in fidelity between likes and claps (or any other online interaction) is an important consideration, because it’s a step in the right direction.
The Right Direction
Online interaction, at least of the form we are talking about here, will likely never reach the level of fidelity or satisfaction of real-world social interaction. I would venture to guess many of us have discovered this during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I think that’s OK — it would be unrealistic for us to expect the exact same type of interaction on a completely different medium. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to make that medium better.
Claps are one example of an attempt to provide greater fairness and transparency in the online world. Other improvement are already happening, such as Instagram offering the choice to hide the number of likes from posts. Big platforms are gradually getting better, and new ones are learning from their mistakes.
Although it might not always feel like it, we, as users, have a role to play in shaping our online environment that we interact in so frequently. Even though claps don’t make a difference for supporting writers financially, I believe there’s more reason than ever to use them as a tool to create a better virtual world.
When I started writing this story, I expected to simply share my excitement and attempt to prompt people to think about the difference between likes and claps, but it turns out that I had more to say than I thought. I hope this discussion sparked something useful or interesting — feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or get in touch.
Your attention is valuable. Thank you for entrusting it to me.
This article is part 11 of my 50 Bad Articles initiative, where I write 50 crappy articles in 50 days, in an attempt to kickstart my writing journey.
