People who use other platforms are used to hitting a button once to give feedback, to like a post, or to retweet it, or something similar to that concept. So, confronted with clap button that doesn't have an obvious scale, a lot of people don't know what to do.

I don't really mind. The metric I look at more closely isn't how many claps I got, but how many people clapped. I think that's at least marginally more meaningful.

What Medium does with the number-of-claps information, for distribution purposes, I honestly have no idea.

If somebody claps for one of my stories only one time, I kind of get the same message as Linda. But on the other hand I realized that people who are not Medium writers don't know the culture and don't know that one-clap rule of thumb.

So you just never know!