Heya! I run Medium's Boost Nomination Pilot (https://blog.medium.com/a-nosy-faq-about-nominating-stories-for-our-boost-44bbf79549c), and I wanted to chime in here -- when I'm onboarding new nominators into the program, they are specifically trained to focus on finding the hidden gems and unknown writers.

We also have nominators who were brought into the Boost Nomination Pilot specifically because they run publications catered to new writers.

If you look at the Medium Distribution Guidelines, you'll see that the popularity of a writer has ZERO determination on whether a story is selected Boost. It's simply not a factor.

If we just wanted to feature popular writers, we would just use algorithms and robots. It's easy to find popular stories -- it takes real live humans find the true quality: the hidden gems, the deeply niche stories, and the new writers.