There is one chap on Medium who spends considerable time making sure you know why your story didn’t work or your opinion is wrong. But those folks are rare (so far.) As a musician, I relate to the clap system on Medium. That’s how musicians judge how they are doing in a live performance. No claps and the song/your band (story) was terrible or boring. A few claps is polite applause. Still painful. You want people to get excited. 50 claps is a standing ovation.

Of course, everyone On Medium has their own clapping system, so it doesn’t really work that way on Medium. And worst of all for humor writers, we can’t hear the laugher. At least comedians get that. So I really appreciate comments that say “I laughed” or “that was funny.” How else would we know?