At this moment, Illumination has published 109 articles today.

I agree this is an abomination that's made possible not just by what the tools allow but also by what our recommendation algorithm incentivizes.

We put all 109 of those into our recommendation pool and so it really is the case that the Illumination is just collecting as many lottery tickets as it can.

So what's the role of a publication? Certainly not to claim credit without doing work.

Traditionally these big aggregators have made the case that they do author support. Also I know that new authors appreciate being in any publication at all. It's a sort of milestone of recognition.

For the most part, these articles would have been published on Medium regardless.

So I do think publications need to provide more value in terms of curation. I'd rather see those 109 articles spread out over 10-20 smaller publications with tighter focuses and points of view.

The status quo is a case study in how current Medium rewards too much for quantity and not enough for quality.