“Trending on Medium” — The Biggest Waste of Real Estate on the App

Am I the only one puzzled by this?

I have been around on Medium for long enough to understand most of the platform’s features and nuances despite the black box that it can be.

However, one feature that I still fail to comprehend is the list of stories under “Trending on Medium” on the homepage / search function on the app.

Here is the list showing as top 5 trending at the time of writing. A bunch of announcements, news items and a couple of genuine articles.

When you click in to one of them, you would expect thousands of claps and hundreds of comments for them to beat the whole platform’s content and show up in top 5 trending.

But, alas! I clicked on the #2 article and here is what I saw — 1 clap and 1 comment. What the hell?!!

The #2 most “trending” article on Medium has a whole ONE fan and ONE comment? Wow, my 3 year old son could fart and draw the attention of more than one person, as could all of us.

The fact that most of these are random announcements by business accounts or news pieces tells me they may be drawing a lot of external traffic or Google clicks and the SEO is probably what makes them “trending” on the weird measure that Medium is using.

Can some of the veterans of Medium or the tech savvy developers / coders on here tell me what is up please?

This is the most frustrating bit of Medium ever which promotes crap pieces as the most trending pieces of the platform.