Like Meredith Arthur, I also question the metric of “most recommends” as a metric for deciding what is “best.” None of the articles that I’ve read that I consider to be the best writing on Medium appear anywhere on your lists. Likewise, a lot of the articles in your lists I found to be mediocre regurgitations of ubiquitous “life-hacking” advice. Your lists are like the results of a high school popularity contest. The top cheerleaders and football players got the most votes. Go team go! Quality, substance and notions of what is “best” are, of course, subjective and you can’t make lists with that. Medium’s current ‘recommend’ system is at best just a high school popularity rating system which makes it no better than any other social media or any other ranking system in society. Like most aspects of Western society the focus is always on quantity rather than quality. Sadly, Medium is no better or no different than anything else. It would be nice if Medium could find a way to break out of that rigid mental box. But I’m not holding my breath. Popularity is just far too ingrained in mass consciousness and mass ego and as long as it remains so quantity will always trump quality.