Interesting article Mark. I think it’s worth mentioning that an automated way of putting content in front of people is still there, as before, but the Boost is designed for humans with expertise in their field to find unsung gems.

As a sizeable publication already reaching a lot of people, it could be argued that a Boost isn’t necessary for you to reach a lot of people, as it would be someone who wrote something excellent but doesn’t have a way for the algorithm to connect with them without a bit of a helping hand.

I’m likewise worried about the payment changes for August tho, as my own is a third of what I’d expect to see so far. I think the new changes have made the “passive income” of old stories reliably making money worse - for some reason. Hard to say for sure. I’m going to give it a little while longer to see if things adjust.

But if Medium has attracted 100K new subscribers this month alone, directly correlating to when the Boost system came into effect, I don’t see that going away because human curation is evidently working.