I haven’t done a statistical analysis of Medium’s article promotion strategy because I’m not sure how to go about that (at least not without spending way more time than I have on this), but I’ve documented in the past what to me are very clear indications of Medium’s bias in what they promote, how they selectively enforce their speech-policing policies, etc.:
Your screenshots are similar to what my daily experience of Medium has been in the past. I actually stopped reading on Medium with any regularity due to the fact that I was being fed so much of this first-person identity-based drivel that read as little more than one-upmanship in a game of how far can I ratchet up the histrionic vitriol against white people and/or men while still getting tons of “likes” and not getting kicked off of Medium for hate speech? (The depressing answer: pretty darned far.) I just decided, in the end, that, in lieu of spending my time getting annoyed at other people’s amateurish idiocy, I’d rather read more professional versions of the same kind of idiocy in the likes of The New York Times or WaPo or Slate or Buzzfeed or The Atlantic or wherever, while at the same time reading more serious articles in the kinds of publications I actually often find interesting and enlightening, even when I disagree with them (Jacobin, The American Conservative, New York Review of Books, Boston Review, Dissent, The Nation, First Things, Quillette, Areo, etc.).
I’m decently sure that if an investigative journalist ever took the time to dig down into what goes on behind the scenes at Medium, they would find that Medium Staff engages in even more hackish and appalling versions of what is now coming out about Jeff Zucker’s fat thumb on the scale at CNN. At some point the political biases of these tech companies are going to be policed away (either by the market or by legislators), but it hasn’t happened yet.
In response to your comment about length, yes, I do think if you could manage to make your pieces a bit shorter (closer in length to your letter to the editor to WaPo), you’d get more readers. An editor at one of the publications I listed above told me earlier this year that “page views drop significantly after 3,000 [words] and even more so after 4,000,” and that’s at a publication where readers are expecting thoughtful essays, not quick, light reads.
I myself also have an issue with tending towards excessive length — I don’t like leaving stones unturned — but it does entail a sacrifice of readership. Maybe the solution is lots of moving parts where each article you write is focused more narrowly on one issue but you have lots of hyperlinks in there to other pieces where you’ve addressed some other specific sub-issue (I know you already do that to some extent, but maybe going more in that direction would help). Many readers will not click through, but some will, and at least that way, you address everything you want to address, just not in one place, and so, avoid intimidating readers.
