Hi Valeria,

I appreciate your well-informed and well-expressed assessment. I will certainly agree that Prof. Benhabib is not good at "dumbing down" her writing. Some critiques about the structure and formatting of the article can be made, as you say.

Here is my counterpoint, or points, to express my feelings on the matter.

I time and again see poorly written, poorly argued, unsourced, and empty articles Boosted. Why? Maybe because they are written with short paragraphs and filled with lost of pictures. Mostly, though, because their content is empty and unchallenging. I've seen Boosted four-paragraph movie reviews that say nothing more than "yay" or "boo" about the movie. I've seen Boosted long meandering stories that never present a coherent stream of thought. but they have lots of pictures and have short paragraphs with fluffy words. Specifically related to Prof. Benhabib's article, I saw an article Boosted that said nothing more about the Israel-Palestinian issue other than quote a bunch of statistics and paste in a bunch of pictures of crying children. No thesis, no subject matter, but it was Boosted because it has short paragraphs and didn't say anything of consequence.

The issue is subject matter and there is a disposition in the Boost program against deep, intellectual philosophy articles. I point again to my own nomination statistics:

Nonphilosophy articles I have nominated have an 86% acceptance rate (18 of 21).

Philosophy articles I have nominated have a 20% acceptance rate (5 of 25)

According to Medium, “the current acceptance rate average is 70%.”

The difference is the subject matter, because I am judging the articles on the same quality criteria. Is it about article structure? That helps, but it doesn't help of your short paragraph, filled with pictures article is about philosophy. As someone who runs a publication to promote critical thinking and philosophy on Medium, the unfair treatment of authors is frustrating.

My apologies for the impassioned spewing.