[SyneRyder]

>How are they different from many other blog systems before them?

There is one key difference: Medium's popular posts recommendation algorithm is not based on pageviews, but on the time that people spend reading them. It was an attempt to solve the issue of clickbait. From Business Insider:

With Medium, Williams was on a mission to clean up the mess that blogging had become, the misinformation and drivel it attracted. He hoped to cure professional journalism of these ills, too.

“The state of tech blogs is atrocious. It’s utter crap,” he told Bloomberg’s Brad Stone in 2013. “They create a culture that is superficial and fetishizing and rewarding the wrong things and reinforcing values that are self-destructive and unsustainable.” And he said he was “pessimistic about the state of media, and that’s why I want to work on this problem.”

His idea back then was an algorithm that recommended high-quality stories not based on clicks, but on how much time people spent reading them.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-meltdown-of-evan-...