One other major problem is the inclusion within the programme of high volume, publish-any-old-crap publications - you can probably think of several examples - purely, it would seem, on the basis of their number of followers, and the loudness of their owners. While such pubs may indeed publish 20+ boost-worthy stories in a month, they perform no function of curation, editing, filtering or targetting, and so do nothing to increase the prevalence of quality on the platform.

Not only do they fail to deliver on the intended purpose of the boost programme, but they actively undermine its validity in the eyes of both readers and - especially - writers.

One way to avoid this would have been to limit the programme to specialist pubs, which was supposedly a key point (albeit with its own drawbacks), but has been laxly applied.