Confusing Metric

My stats from last week…

I don’t want to throw a self-pity party (well…yeah, I kinda do), but I’m seriously confused by this picture.

I don’t like to think of myself as a “clap-whore” (you’ll never have to worry about me publishing a list that enumerates the ways you can be happy/successful/etc.), but I can see the value of them. In their own way, claps here help to stave off the sense of rejection I think writers are all too familiar with. They are nice. That said, I don’t think it’s always important to have 1k+ claps (though I confess I was ridiculously happy with my first experience of that kind). Some stories flop. I get it. But I’d almost prefer to have more fans than claps for a given piece, because it feels like you might have reached/touched more people.

Yeah, I know that Poetry isn’t the most popular category on Medium, but there’s a few of us writing here (& some damned good ones, too!). & it’s true that I don’t clap for everything I read here, but I clap far, far more often than I don’t…which is not to say that there must be quid pro quo. I don’t think that.

I am not so arrogant to think that everything I write is gold, either. But 800+ reads; good start. Only 71 fans?!? Huh? I generally hit about a quarter to a third of my reads as fans. That’s not where I would like to be or want to end up, but it beats the…