Thanks. This was a bit of a weird one, to be honest. It really felt like it would be slapped down because 'We don't want people just slipping some little personal anecdote in to make it seem like they have relevant experience and expertise', which they were whinging about a while back.

But, I think that being here in Alex's pub maybe helped, as it joined the Boost programme later, so maybe still gets the 'benefit of the doubt, keep the new members happy' leg-up.

It would be interesting to see whether in general approval rates drop off the longer a pub has been in the programme.

I still reckon they are lab rat testing us. Individually and as pubs. Because Medium has zero interest in 'promoting good writing'. It's a corporation - it's only interest is 'promoting the writing that hooks in new paying subscribers'. That might coincidentally be 'good writing'. But it might also be 'self-help listicle shite'. They don't care, and any claim they do is bullshit.

Sure, 'the online home of quality writing' sounds cool, if it works commercially. But just look at those Michelin chefs putting their names to supermarket ready meals. Even fucking Burger King (Dabiz Muñoz, one of the star TV chefs in Spain has a 'King Dabiz' burger he's promoting now).

So for their marketing purposes, they need stats. Which means getting a big enough sample of each 'strain' of writing, right? No point just boosting 2 or 3 by an author, or from a pub. You want a bunch, concentrated in time, so the contextual circumstances - the users on the platform around that time - are consistent. So you seed petri dishes with 30 Claphams, 30 Ogleys, 30 Iberosphericals, 30 Peregrine Journals, and see which generates the best returns. And then rank them for efficacy, and reward or punish accordingly.

The penicillin is mightier than the sword. Or something.

I think that's part of the Boost roll-out tactic. It's not 'we love this and want to keep making it bigger', so much as 'we want a constant stream of new data sets to set against each other, to steer our marketing decisions'.

Oh, such cynicism in one so not young anymore!

But I bet I'm at least partly right.