The Sound of One Fan Leaving
And taking their claps with them
Yesterday I had something like 18 negative claps on my stat page. I use the Medium Enhanced Stats Chrome Extension which provides, you guessed it, enhanced stats. In addition to the usual stats of Views, Reads, Read Ratio, and Fans, it also includes Claps and it keeps a daily tally of Views, Reads, Fans, and Claps.
That’s where I noticed the negative number of claps, in the daily tally.
At first, I thought that it was some glitch, but then I realized that it was actually occurring. Some of my fans have become former fans. This involves them going back through my articles, finding the undo clap button, and then magically sucking all of their claps and the joy they provided out into the void. Sometimes hundreds of claps in total are unclapped.
When claps disappear, so too do fans, as the stat is a record of how many people clapped for a specific story.
