I find highlights encouraging because the reader is indicating to the author what appealed to them.

Thank you for explaining how highlights work.

I've noticed that Medium now only reveals the first reader who highlighted a passage and not all the readers, as they used to. My Medium highlights folder where I save the email notifications of highlights from Medium, reveals in many cases that more than one reader highlighted the same passage, yet on Medium only shows one reader.

One of the highlights on a story I published only said "top highlight' without revealing any name at all!