Charles Bastille
1 min readFeb 14, 2025

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I see my name! I see my name! :-)

I used to be somewhat formulaic about my claps. Sort of like, good stuff always got 20 claps or so, really good stuff more, and so on up the food chain. This strategy was often ruined whenever I clapped on the phone, because the Medium phone app loves to navigate away from a page when I'm in the middle of clapping, never to offer me a chance to return.

50 claps were pretty rare no matter what.

But now that Coach Tony has made an already obfuscated engagement system even worse and killed everyone's earnings, I give everyone 50 claps if I like a story even a teensy tiny bit. There's no way now for someone to know that I was absolutely and hopelessly in love with their story.

Medium has ruined the clap system. So 50 claps it is. It helps the author. Supposedly it helps even more that I'm FOM, but I never believed that hype, and I still don't.

Do I sound cynical?

Me? Cynical? Never!!!

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Charles Bastille
Charles Bastille

Written by Charles Bastille

Author of MagicLand & Psalm of Vampires. Join me on my Substack at https://www.ruminato.com/. All stories © 2020-24 by Charles Bastille

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