This would be a very simple thing for Medium to fix: simply don’t allow claps unless the clapper has read the story.

However, I do need to point out something many members do not realize.

If you look at the stats for a story, you may see claps and no reads. This can be because Medium doesn’t update these figures at the same time: read stats always lag claps.

So if Joe claps for your story but you see no reads, Joe MAY have read it but Medium hasn’t caught up with recording yet.

How do I know that? Because publication editors can see the stats (except earnings) of stories by other people in our publications. So I can see that Medium recorded my clap but did not yet record the read.