What do you think of Medium’s “clapping” system?

what
2018-09-09T04:20:41Z

I’m not recommending this for Tildes or anything, I just wanted to know your thoughts on it.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, on Medium, you can “applaud” articles and comments. To do this, you hold down the clap button, and depending on how long you hold it down, the more applause you give (up to a limit of 50). The best example would probably be if you go on any Medium article and try it yourself.

I’ve never really seen any discussion on it, so I was interested in hearing your thoughts.

I think the idea of essentially having to convert time holding down a button to a number of likes is interesting.

The problems that come to mind are that you could easily automate it, and that it could suffer the “5 star” rating system problem, where the majority of people will either dislike something enough to rate it 1 star, love it enough to rate it 5 stars, or not care enough to rate it at all (or in this case, give it 50 claps or nothing).

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