I’m still not sure why this is. My best guess is that it has to do with the fact that Medium’s users outside North America are concentrated in the tech industry. I would go further to say that a lot of its users outside the US and Canada are probably English-speaking Indians based in big cities like Bangalore who work as programmers.
Like this article posted on Sept. 28, which cropped up in my “Popular on Medium” section already has 6.6K claps from 1,200 people:
So putting two and two together, I would say that Medium’s recommendations are generally geared toward showing you what’s popular with its user base as a whole rather than what’s popular among readers with similar tastes as you.
If things were working as they should, it wouldn’t matter that Medium’s user base is disproportionately Indian or American or whatever (I’m not saying that’s the case, but it could be). Those users would get the stories that appeal to them and I’d get the stories I like.
Another possibility is that hackers are using what they know to game the system by astroturfing with fake accounts and bots to automate claps and reads for their programming blogs to make money. This sort of stuff was rampant on Twitter until they adopted anti-automation measures.
If you go to forums like Black Hat World, you can find lots of discussions about how to do this on Facebook and Twitter. I haven’t checked to see if they are talking about doing it on Medium, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
