There were plenty of scheming, get-rich-quick articles in 2020 on Medium. They do well not because the platform boosts them but because the platform is open, and open platforms aren’t meritocratic. The cream doesn’t rise to the top in democracy or in a free market because open systems tend to be plagued by parasites and predators, and because most folks have poor taste.

As a boost nominator, I never read a meta-article about how to earn money on Medium, let alone nominate one for a boost. The problem isn’t so much with Medium, but with many readers out there on the internet. What do they consider top quality content? What are they interested in reading, in between watching porn or viewing Instagram photos? Articles of substance, or schemes to earn easy money? Medium is open to everyone, which means its standards are largely as high or as low as the folks who participate.

There’s some high-quality, substantive content on Medium, and a lot of garbage too. That’s because excellence itself is rare, as it is in all endeavours. Just because you can write a series of grammatical sentences doesn’t mean you have anything to write that’s worth reading. Writing well in the literary, artistic sense requires a fine mind, one with a rich inner life, and that, too, is rare.

It’s up to the audience to learn to ignore what deserves to be ignored, and to find what deserves to be found.

By the way, the purpose of boosting on Medium is to circumvent the limitations of the algorithms and of open platforms, and to inject some old-fashioned good taste into the judging of content.