The handbook you're referring to is for our internal curation team. And yes, our team of curators work very hard to avoid bias when Boosting stories.

But my reference was about networking with *nominators* not curators. The Boost Nomination Pilot is an experiment built with the assumption that nominators would be biased.

That's part of why we structured the program so that all nominations go through curation. Nominators can't Boost, they can only nominate.

This assumption that nominators will have some elements of bias isn't because I think anyone is shady -- part of being a publication editor is having strong opinions about what you like, and that's bias! And that's great, as long as that potentially biased nomination goes through our internal curation team before being Boosted.

So yes: curators avoid bias. Nominators are assumed to have some level of bias.