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What Would Happen If 111 People Read Your Post

But Nobody Clapped?

Roz Warren, Writing Coach
3 min readOct 24, 2019
Photo by Charles 🇵🇭 on Unsplash

Last week I did something a little different. I wrote a post that I asked readers not to clap for.

Here’s the question I wanted to answer: If 100 people read a post but nobody clapped, what, if anything, would it earn?

Many Medium writers believe that while claps are the primary metric Medium uses to measure reader engagement, highlighting and commenting and the number of people who read your work count for something too.

But do they?

I wanted to find out.

After the post was published, I kept checking and re-checking my stats. It was counter intuitive, and really kind of cool, to hope for a lack of clapping. As the number of reads piled up, I was thrilled to see that nobody had clapped!

By Sunday night 111 people had read the post — and not a single one had applauded.

The space next to the little hand was empty!

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Roz Warren, Writing Coach
Roz Warren, Writing Coach

Written by Roz Warren, Writing Coach

Writing Coach Roz Warren (roSwarren@gmail.com) helps Medium writers craft better, more boost-able stories. Roz used to write for the New York Times.

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