I totally hear you on your concerns, Russell! I need to clarify something very important, though: folks in the Boost Nomination Pilot do not have the power to Boost a story. Only Medium's internal curation team can do that.

Nominators can only nominate stories for curation's consideration. This means that if they nominate a biased, self-promotional story... the curators simply decline the nomination and move on. The nominator's story acceptance rate declines, and a low acceptance rate could lead to being removed from the program.

Curators work very hard to avoid bias, but nominator bias is an expected aspect of this program. Not because nominators are shady people, but because the vast majority of them are publication editors, and publication editors are by their very nature, extremely biased. Editing a publication involves having strong opinions. That's expected. That's part of why nominators can't Boost -- they can only nominate.

And algorithms are still a huge part of the distribution process. Subjectively selected Boosted stories get 500 views, but if the story doesn't resonate with readers, the algorithmic lift doesn't get you far after those 500 views... because objectively speaking the people have spoken, and they're not into that story. So we move on.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. This is a learning process for all of this, and feedback and questions like yours are appreciated!