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I Finally “Got” the Clap on Medium!

Lucky for us, I haven’t run out — I can give it to you, too.

Holly Jahangiri
5 min readJun 25, 2020

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If I don’t get kicked off the platform for that title, alone.

Photo by Austin Ban on Unsplash

When I was new to Medium, and knew only a very few people, and were very generous with the clapping. I vaguely remembered something from the old days — back when I thought of myself as “just a reader” (not realizing that every comment was a story) that we could only give out three little hearts, or hands, or whatever the currency of approval was, back then. So I was surprised to see that we could now give 50! Was this the equivalent of a standing ovation?

Money for Nothin’ and Your Claps for Free

I was a tiny bit disappointed to learn that applause was no longer tied, in any way, to compensation. But such a system would be too easy to game, and I had seen several sites similar to Medium go under, due to nefarious “writers.” These were not writers, in my opinion, at all — they were more like people at a casino who’d worked out a way to cheat the house and were riding that high like the Wolf of Wall Street. That story always ends with everything crashing down around their ears, but often takes the house and all the…

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