Are You the One Who Is Clapping for Multiple Stories Without Reading?

Stop it.

Me. My Photo.

This needs to stop. Medium is at risk. Knock it off.

Four times this week I have opened my notifications to see a new person who has clapped for eight or ten of my stories, all at the same time stamp. This got my attention. I thought at first that maybe I had a new “super-reader.” But it was impossible. Some of those stories were 20-minute essays and every clap had the “34 minutes ago” time stamp. No way they did anything more than clap-and-run. They just wanted to get my attention.

I used to be able to mostly trust that a clap or a response was from a person who had read the story or at least perused it.

Perhaps the old “follow-for-follow” is seeing such diminishing returns, that people/bots/scammers are resorting to other tactics to get followers and engagement.

I recently did a statistical analysis of my new followers for January and December and found that about 90–95% of them never interacted with my stories by clapping, highlighting, or responding. Those kinds of numbers make the “new follower” notification meaningless to me. I now only pay attention to claps, responses, and highlights in deciding who to interact with, and I am guessing that what I learned in my statistical analysis, others are feeling too…