Thanks for your excellent submission! Love the opening bit! Hahaha!

Okay - claps - they are for everything you listed - apart from the kitty cat shooing. They also make Medium's algorithm happy and show it that you are engaging with other writers.

The more claps, the merrier. You can hold the button down and it will do lots of claps for you. You're allowed up to 50 claps per article.

Think of them as applause. If you went to a concert and liked a song, you wouldn't clap once! (unless you really hated the song and wanted to make the point, as one clap would feel worse than none!)

Some people here are pretty cheap with the claps, others are quite liberal and like to spread the feel-good factor (guess you can't tell which camp I'm in...).

Have fun with the clap. Uh, the clap option on Medium.