Hi Eric, we merged topics/tags and they do have some impact on distribution. I think you might have been part of a period where there were a few popular topics and only a small number of people could curate into them. That's not true anymore with so many people adding tags.

Our idea, in the works, is to give boosting access to all publications. Boosting would impact what their followers see and would feed up into a pool that our curators look at. We want publications in the role of tastemakers--it takes a subject matter expert to spot an important piece and why. Then our curators are there mainly to keep the system honest.

This is of course not built yet or fully defined and so probably will change a bit between now and whenever it arrives.