Wil, thank you for being clear on your opinion! 🙂

A couple notes:

1. Feel free to ignore the claps or only click it once. Essentially, it’s the same as recommending.
2. There is actually a lot of deep thinking behind the system, which is non-intuitive. For those who didn’t get a chance to read it, please see our explanation here.
3. It’s early days, but we think this system can help discovery of great stuff, which is our goal. We will know more about this soon and share what we’ve found.
4. This system (or something like it) is critical for our new approach to paying people based on the quality of their writing. Every other scheme we can think of would have the effect of recreating the hugely detrimental system of fighting for eyeballs (pageviews) instead of being rewarded for quality. We’re trying to fight the dark forces of advertising that are destroying our minds and democracy. Claps may look silly, but this is serious stuff. Again, this is a theory, but is is a well-considered one. And we’ll know more soon.

We appreciate everyone’s voice on this — even those that make us sad — and your willingness to engage in our experiments. Our goal is to make Medium great for everyone. Sometimes our attempts will be off base, but we’re going to keep inventing…well, probably forever. I hope you will too.

💚