Arguments ought to be able to stand on their own merits. My appearance, name, sex, race, and even my qualifications are all irrelevant to the correctness of my arguments; the other stuff is irrelevant except as a signal to others as to whether considering the argument is worth their time.

Regarding abuse, I’ve been critical, yes, because I think you are likely in error, and I have explained why (in a slightly patronizing tone, admittedly, as a counter to your belittling tone to MXM). This is not what “abuse” normally means. You, in contrast, have written to me, “Just get lost reply guy.” That’s more along the lines of mildly abusive language. (I am still here because I interpreted this as disrespectful banter, not a genuine request to leave your assertions unchallenged.)

If the top writers are male, there could be a variety of explanations, only some of which have anything to do with an intrinsically biased algorithm. Noting a disparity is sufficient cause to pay attention and inquire about the root cause. It is not sufficient to know where to assign blame.

For instance, you would need to know how many articles are written by men and women to even get started — maybe the problem wasn’t the algorithm at all, but rather the outreach. You’d also need to know the gender composition of people who were reading, and if it wasn’t even, the within-gender versus cross-gender preference for topics. According to https://bloggingguide.com/medium-platform-statistics/, of the top five interests of people who visit, four are heavily male-dominated, suggesting that interest of readers could explain some disparity. (The list of top topics on Medium is not, however, strongly skewed towards topics that show a sizable gender disparity.)

If already-prominent men (or women) moved to Medium, it could skew numbers also, depending on what you look at. Indeed, if you look at the people with the most followers, you find a lot of male authors at the top who were highly popular without Medium’s help because they were CEOs or politicians or whatnot (https://topauthors.xyz/). It is odd to blame Medium’s algorithms for Bernie Sanders and Tim O’Reilly having Medium accounts but Nancy Pelosi and Sheryl Sandberg not.

I just logged in from a computer without a Medium account but with a United States IP address, and took the first 100 articles whose authors’ gender I could identify by name (I skipped 6): 41 were women (chi-square test with 50/50 gender split as null: p = 0.256; 95% confidence interval for number of women per hundred articles, 27–56). So at least in one location in the U.S., there isn’t even support for your assertion of a strong gender bias in the output of its algorithm when they have no data about the user. (This isn’t to say that there isn’t one elsewhere. But I didn’t find it.)

In your original article, you said, “For God’s sake will “the guy” who writes the algorithms quit in the Great Resignation so someone else can have a go?”

The evidence that the problem is the algorithm is lacking. Perhaps you will be able to write an article that presents clear evidence. But since it hasn’t happened yet, you shouldn’t expect people to believe it until you do, and you shouldn’t interpret their disagreement as abuse.