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Do You Give a Clap? How do You Decide How Many to Give?
I’m curious how the psychology of clapping works here on Medium.
Sometimes when I write an article, a reader, or popper inner, will give it a solitary clap.
Hmm, I think that person didn’t like what I had to say all that much.
But how do I know?
I can’t know for sure; they may have loved it but felt that a solitary clap was enough to show their appreciation.
While I knew you could leave a number of claps, I only found out recently that you can clap up to 50 times for one article.
This made me think about the claps I left in more detail.
As soon as I found I could leave 50 claps, I would clap vigorously for articles that really resonated with me. Usually, if I liked an article a lot, I would leave around 25. If an article didn’t intrigue me all that much, but I quite enjoyed reading it, I would leave around 12 to 15 claps. If an article wasn’t particularly well written, but the author had obviously worked hard on the content, I would perhaps leave between 5 and 10 claps.
Now that I know I can leave up to 50, I think the psychological effect has pushed me to be far more generous. And why not? What does it cost to show appreciation?
Every writer that I see here on Medium is working hard to create interesting, illuminating, and fun articles. I like the clap-o-meter. It’s a free-to-use and feel-good tool.
Clap as hard as you like for this one!
