Those are two great questions, Roberta.

If it's about ethics, it's a tricky question for me because I'm trying to figure out an answer to a technical problem, not an answer to an ethical question. I'm trying to push the growth of an account without breaking the rules of Medium.

Many people hit the like button on others' tweets, Instagram, or YouTube videos to support those they like without going through the details of their content. It benefits the creators and pushes their posts to the surface so people interested in their content can see their posts.

In my opinion, if a clap gives a push to your article and at the same time allows the clapper to nudge you, then it's a win-win. People have to let go of their egos on social media.

Medium seems to calculate read time in a specific way that I'm not clear about yet. Some people read quickly, and Medium will count it as a read, while others read slow and leave a comment but with no sign of reading on my stats. I'm not sure about how the algorithm works yet.

One hypothesis is that Medium assigns each article an estimated read time, then calculates the total time spent on the article, divides it by the estimated read time, and counts it as total reads at the end of the day or the month.