How will this affect independent writers?

It seems there is no way to pitch these new publications, and they occupy more than half of the Medium homepage. The creators are propelled to “Medium stardom” within days. Salty, for example, looks incredible — but it is already achieving Medium fame on day 3 because of the rigorous promotion that Medium has done.

There’s no way to pitch to OneZero.

Some people on this platform have put in serious, serious work to get their first 1000 followers or to get their first featured article, but this new system ensures that the articles published in these publications get thousands and thousands of views by default.

Will this squash the rest of us? Or will we be able to pitch these publications, too?