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The Meaning of “Claps”, from Ancient Rome to Medium
The pursuit of applause is thousands of years old
What exactly does a “clap” on Medium mean?
People have hotly debated this ever since Medium’s executives first introduced the clap in 2017. When — soon after — Medium announced that claps would affect how much a writer was paid for any given post, it treblecharged the perceived importance of, and lust for, claps. These days, that straightforward relationship between claps and cash isn’t so true any more (Medium’s payment alchemy, as the site explains, is weighted more towards the reading time of paying subscribers).
Nonetheless, the “clap” remains a much-chewed-over subject. The shelves of Medium’s virtual library groan beneath the weight of thinkpieces pondering how much one ought to clap for a piece, and, conversely, how much one ought to care about claps. I sympathize with the obsession. Claps are a “social proof” — which is to say, if a random reader happens to stumble across a post that has tons of claps, they might be more likely to read it themselves. (Stanley Milgram showed the power of a social proof in 1969 when he got five actors to stand on a sidewalk and stare up in the sky, and found that other passersby would stop and stare too.)
So there’s endless advice. Some recommend that readers be stingy and strategic with doling out one’s claps (make ’em work for it, because claps determine how Medium ranks stories!) Others argue you should clap 50 times, every time (why not encourage effort?). Yet others insist that you should never leave only a single clap, since it’s a brutal form of weak praise. And some urge writers to ignore their clap counts (since it’s an extrinsic reward that can wreck one’s intrinsic motivation), while editors ponder whether it’s weird and astroturfy to clap for stories they themselves have published. And swirling around it all is the question of just what the heck a clap really means.
The thing is, clapping — the type we do with our meat hands — is a very old behavior. So I figured if we consult the records of history, and the historians and thinkers who’ve studied it, it might add some useful context.
Indeed, it turned out to be pretty interesting! And quite revealing of our modern digital…
