It's understandable that you want to defend the contest, Tim, since you won something, but it's completely unfair to characterize the entries of those complaining as listicles, etc. Many people really opened up and worked hard to write something meaningful (not me, but I've read some great ones that would have gotten my vote over some of the winners).

The MWC was, first and foremost, a subscription drive. Its second purpose was brand-building. The diversity of the winners was no accident. It's naive to think that it was. Medium exists to enrich its investors, period. It's not even remotely interested in finding the best writers, only the most useful and profitable ones.

The thing that stands out is that the entries did not seem to get the basic attention a publication editor on the platform would give. For example, the grand prize winner had no subtitle and no photo credit, a clear violation of the rules that entries adhere to Medium guidelines. (When readers brought this to Medium's attention, they quietly substituted a new image with attribution.) The second entry in the runner-up list also featured a photo with no attribution. Every judge read every entry and nobody caught that? An editor should have checked the grand prize-winning essay for rule violations at a minimum.

Tor those who have been writing on Medium for a while and have frequently been admonished by editors to keep stories between three and eight minutes, it seems odd that the four winners were of a length that would have been passed over by most readers.