Yeah, I don’t really get the point of the “clap” system. All it’ll do is (i) make it harder to discern how many people actually liked an article, (ii) result in people having to waste more time on what used to be one simple click, and (iii) result in writers getting offended by how few or how many “claps” they got from some reader (like, “why did you only give me five claps for this great article I wrote?”). Medium’s management/Medium Staff are obviously dysfunctional, as nearly every idea they come up with in an effort to improve the site seems to make it worse and more clunky. If they were really trying to create some differentiation in degrees of “liking” an article, why not do something simpler like a scale of 1–5 on which you can rate it, or, if they only wanted to permit positive feedback, then how about just a few options such as “liked it,” “loved it” and “one of the best I’ve read on Medium”? People can differentiate that; they understand the difference when they’re given a scale of three to five options. But what the heck is the difference between 23 claps and 24 claps or even 23 claps and 33 claps? I suspect most people will either click the clap button once or else default to something like 1 clap, 3 claps, 5 claps, 10 claps, 25 claps, 50 claps. Like, who is ever going to think, “Hmm, this one is at about a 27 on a 50 point scale,” and to the extent anyone does think that, where they ultimately settle on one day vs. the next is going to be pretty random. All of this is so obvious upon two-seconds thought that you really have to be utterly asinine or just out to sabotage the existing “recommend” system to do something like this. If anyone has an explanation beyond Medium’s brief e-mail on this, I’d love to hear it.