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What I wish I knew earlier about Medium’s most powerful metric
Handclaps on Medium are a complete waste. The most powerful metric for both writers and readers is broken on Medium and it needs to be fixed. The fix I am proposing is easy to institute and will improve the Medium user experience while strengthening the platform.
Why Writers deserve better
Many of us write articles daily on Medium spending hours researching, editing, and physically typing out our work. In return, we get a platform to distribute our content and an audience who can enjoy it. To us writers, this is a good deal.
And most of us are not able to make a living strictly from our Medium writing. Earning money is a benefit, but recognition is also a big motivator in every field. And Medium has a handclap feature to provide this recognition.
However, the handclap feature is the most useless metric the platform offers. And it should be one of the most valuable. The issue is that readers have the option of clapping anywhere from 1–50 times per post with a 50 clap daily limit.
When I am trying to gauge how well received my content is, I can’t count on this metric. Let’s imagine that I have 55 claps on an article. Does this mean that one person clapped 50 times and another person clapped 5 times? Or, did five people clap 11 times? Or…
