It's Jan 2022, 15 months after this piece was written but I just started noticing weird clap-to-comment ratios in articles by (almost) unknowns. These articles are being served to me on my Medium home page, so "curated".

Usually, if an article has >1K claps there will be more than 50 comments. A new Tim Denning piece I read this morning had 822 claps and 16 engaged and thoughtful comments. That's the usual ratio of claps to comments and it all looked legit to me.

But in the past few days I have been seeing articles with >1K claps and only 5 or 6 low-quality, one sentence comments.... like "Thanks for this" or "Me too".

I reckon some of these writers have found a way to get inauthentic claps. And, sadly I feel like they are succeeding with getting curated as a result.

Has anyone else seen this?