Exactly, Tim. The Boost should be just that - an extra lift to get writers noticed. And once readers have seen and enjoyed their work, it should turn up in their feed, if those writers subsequently publish on related topics or in the same pub.

You shouldn't need to be 'boosted' every single time, at the say-so of a curator who has greater or lesser familiarity with the subject in question, and a greater or lesser understanding of what audiences might like (and let's assume that given the recent payroll cost-cutting, the ongoing trend will be towards 'lesser' in the form of junior interns).

Because the platform knows who read what, who clapped, who commented, who followed. All those data are gathered and processed as part of the earnings formula. So Medium has already done the work of assigning a relative engagement value to each reader's interaction with each piece.

But the distribution algorithm then resolutely refuses to act on the data output generated for the earnings formula.

It's as if everyone's reading history and associated data were wiped daily - The Eternal Shinola of the Clueless Data Miner.

Or Netflix suggesting 'You might like this...' and serving up simply a random selection of titles, disregarding everything you've ever watched.