Clapometry
The study of Medium clapping
There has been a lot of discussion on Medium about the clapping metric. I’ve read a lot about it and I’ve ventured forth a perspective or two but I’ve been essentially bored with it.
It seems to be what it is and no one really knows what it is. For very understandable reasons, Medium does not reveal much about the inner workings of this system. We are left to guess and ponder.
Well, recently an idea somehow drifted into my noggin. It was an idea that had not been circulated among Medium posts and responses in regard to, THE CLAP.
On the internet most social media sites are designed around the basics of junior high school popularity paradigms. Popularity is measured by likes and claps and hearts and emojis and other metrics. Popularity is always the supreme metric in measuring quality and importance.
Medium does everything in its power to proclaim that it is NOT a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter and the like. Yet its all-powerful algorithm, as well as its curating staff, are designed to find those stories and articles that are the most popular in order to determine what is featured.
So everything is relegated to popularity. So, although Medium claims NOT to be a social networking site they rely on metrics that gauge popularity. Hey, you’ve got to use some system to know what to throw up on the home page, right?
So Medium came up with the seemingly novel idea of claps. But this clapping system is based on junior high school popularity.
Allow me to delineate. If you’re not too disgustingly old as I am, you can remember back to junior high school. I can, almost.
What is everything based on in junior high school? Besides popularity, the answer is grades! Everyone who went through public education in America and perhaps some other countries knows that everything is graded.
Everything is graded and it is graded on the A through F system. So let’s apply that to the Medium model of clapping….
41 through 50 claps = A
31 through 40 claps = B
21 through 30 claps = C
11 through 20 claps = D
1 through 10 claps = F
So if you read an article or story that you really like and you give it one clap you are essentially giving that story or article an F-. You are essentially saying that the story or article sucked.
This boggled my mind. I have read responses to stories that I’ve loved and I gave those responses 18 claps. This was like saying that the story was below average and not very good despite the fact that I loved the response.
I’ve read stories or articles that I was profoundly impressed by and thought they were at the top of the level of quality of stories that I read on Medium but I only gave them 27 claps which means, according to the above scenario, that they were merely average.
I didn’t mean to say that they were just average. I wanted to show that I felt they were far above average. But I failed to do so because of the inadequate claps I clicked. I failed to grasp the junior high school grading system my claps were based on.
While I thought I was up-voting a story I was actually down-voting it.
Is this the way the almighty Medium algorithm judges stories? Is this the system the almighty Medium curating staff determines what is popular enough to be featured in a stream?
Is this junior high school grading system at the heart of the Medium grading system?
Thinking about this I realized that I have been clapping all wrong. I realized that I have not been clapping nearly enough to reflect how I truly felt about an article or story.
I am that asshole in the audience who claps but fails to stand up for a standing ovation. I feel terrible about that. I should have been on my feet clapping and standing in ovation for so many stories to which I merely stayed in my seat and clapped a few times.
I now realize that I have been profoundly deficient in my clapping.
Medium provides means to clap but they do not provide the means for a standing ovation. They are too busy measuring claps. They are too steeped in quantitative clapping to go beyond quantity into quality. They are too stuck in the junior high school popularity contest paradigm.
But do we really blame Medium? Like every other site on the internet they are based solely on numbers. They can only judge quality by quantity just like every other website. Even their small panel of curators looks toward numbers to decide what they will allow to appear in feeds. It’s all about numbers.
But as Medium users we have a little bit of power. Right now, the only power we are allowed is in our clapping. Right now, the only metric used in determining the visibility of a story or article is in the quantity of claps.
So our power is in claps. Clap power! So it becomes important how we view our clapping power. Understandably, Medium keeps secret how it views clap power. They don’t want to reveal how to game the system. But they still, obviously, judge posts quantitatively, based on the junior high school popularity model.
So, with this in mind, we all have to look at how we clap. Do we use the above-mentioned grading system not knowing how close the Medium curating staff follows this system? Does the Medium algorithm follow this junior high school grading system?
Does it make sense to follow this above-mentioned grading system when we clap? Do we really know how our clapping is affecting the stories and articles we are clapping for?
My advice is, “When in doubt, clap like a motherfucker! And don’t be afraid to stand in ovation, whether or not that is registered on the Medium junior high school grading system. Clap on the above-mentioned grading system as though that is how Medium judges things. Clap like you mean it. Spread the Clap!”
(Please excuse my vulgarity.)
Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.
Don’t miss my recent short stories….
Let’s spread The Clap!
