Greg, thanks for the response! I am encouraged to hear the Medium team continues to experiment behind the scenes with the concept of “connections” and how it manifests itself in the available interactions on the site.

I guess a question then is whether you reveal some of these measures once you are ready to “go live” with them or you leave them to be implicit. I guess that cuts both ways. Reveal them and you may incent your users to prioritize quality relationships and writing but you may also incent others to try to game the new rules. Leave them implicit and the desired effect on incentives may not be noticed or take hold as quickly as you would like.

In either case, good luck and I am certainly look forward to participating in the continued evolution of the platform through this year and beyond.