What I find annoying is that they didn’t just add the clapping feature to the ‘heart’ feature but they seem to have completely replaced the ‘heart’ feature with the ‘clap’ feature. There is no way that I can see that you can both ‘heart’ a story and ‘clap’ for it. Sometimes I want to do both.

Overall, I think I like the clap feature but I’m afraid it might send stories that are great even lower in the algorithmic rankings if it doesn’t get a ginormous amount of claps. The amount of claps is not only indicative of how much a story is liked but also about how much a story is viewed. It almost seems like a greater division between the haves and have-nots.

Either way, it doesn’t seem to be, in any way, a measure of quality. It seems like a further reliance on quantity over quality. But that is not only Medium but the entire internet. And it spreads into real-life as well. Quantity, it seems, is what everything is measured by these days.

Anyway, I hope it ends up being a positive thing. I hope ‘the clap’ spreads like wildfire across the internet. Lord knows, it is already spreading like wildfire in the real world.

To Meg , I want the “nominate this for the Pulitzer Prize button.”