I’m no expert on how Medium works, but you seem to be talking about two different things:
- Stories that get curated
- Stories that make it to your signed in (or not signed in) front page.
In the first case, to figure out if there’s a political bias to curation, you’d have to analyze a bunch (sorry, I’m not a statistician) of randomly chosen curated and non curated articles to see if certain viewpoints are favored. You’d also need some sort of objective criteria (good luck with that) to determine if uncurated stories are as well written as curated stories. My intuition tells me that there’s not a slew (see above disclaimer) of uncurated stories with a consensus bias, as opposed to curated stories favoring Champagne Democrats vanquishing Orange Julius.
In the second case, what you are seeing as a prioritization of what shows up on your front page (vs. what shows up when you’re not signed in), I believe that the signed-in version is based on an algorithm that assigned certain weights to stories based on what you’ve read, clapped for, etc. in the past. If you get a bunch of recommendations that you’re not interested in, that discrepancy may result from the limitations of (or a flaw in) the algorithm, rather than some conscious hidden agenda by Medium staff (and yes, it is possible for a bias or agenda to be built into an algorithm). You can fine tune your recommendations by stating you don’t want to see a certain story type again. (Some of the most fruitful YouTube recommendations — again, algorithm-based I’m certain — have been “what the heck” songs that I followed up on anyway. Probably just coincidence, but it’s possible that there’s a “discovery gene” built into the algorithm that makes suggestions that seem contrary to your established tastes.)
