I can understand that being a factor for nommers, not wanting to submit three baseball stories in a row, say. But I seriously doubt that when curators receive a nomination they see any specific info about that writer's or pub's most recent boosts and their subject. Medium simply doesn't do 'targeted, detailed data analysis' like that, I don't think.

But my point is, if 'Pub X' has boosted 3 of my previous 'language' pieces, say, and dozens of Pub X followers have read and clapped and become my followers on the strength of those 3 pieces, a 4th non-boosted 'language' piece on 'Pub X' by me should naturally inherit at least some of those readers, not by boosting, but because the algorithm has correctly learned that "these readers like 'Pub X' and 'language' and 'Writer Y'".

The non-boosted story should find its way into their feed, and at least some would be expected to read - or at least view - it. But it simply doesn't work. I've had cases where a later non-boosted piece in the same subject area and pub has had under half a dozen reads from those outside my 'stalwarts'. This makes no sense. I got more of an audience in my very first week here. That is not the sign of an algorithm that learns anything from all the data it is fed. Which is a quite simply astonishing failure for a tech company. They do have computers in Silicon Valley, don't they?