You’re right. Claps don’t matter so much anymore. As a writer, they can be considered nice to have, but I think they’re mostly distracting. More important are comments and number of people reading the article.

I wish Medium would change the system to a like button or a 5 star rating system. Another interesting possibility would be to hide the claps like Facebook/Instagram do with the likes.

(I wrote an article on the topic

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