I clapped 50 for this because of your last sentence. Thank you so much for the good words, Yearning Lover. It's very much appreciated. (Here's hoping I'll keep on writing articles you like! :D)

As for the claps, on desktop at least, you can hold the button pressed and it goes up automatically. But I agree with you a 1 to 5 scale would be better.

Although the best solution for me would be to hide the claps as we can with the likes on Facebook/Insta. Overall I think writers pay too much attention to claps which is not even a useful statistics (number of views/reads/comments are much more significant).

( I wrote about this

https://medium.com/an-idea/we-need-the-option-to-opt-out-from-like-buttons-everywhere-88c9d59fe441)