I totally agree with you. Although I don’t think just claps is a waste especially if is 50 claps because the longer a reader spends clapping the easier it will be to pick that engagment. I think the more visit a story receives the more Medium algorithm sees the story as valuable and pushes it to more audience. The reason I think this is because when Google sends traffic to my story, those stories get lots of internal reads too. I’m not sure how the Medium algorithm works. I could be wrong, but this is my observation.