Hello Robyn, thank you for your valuable feedback. As the chief editor, I’d like to answer your question. First, let me give a little background.

Over 16K writers contribute to Illumination. These stories are not daily published ones. If you check the dates, most of them are several months old. This is our amplifying account introducing selected stories from a curated collection.

Illumination has published 300K+ stories since its inception. However, we have only curated around 10K stories so far using our criteria.

In this Hand-Picked collection, we daily choose about 100 to 150 pieces from different writers (e.g., beginners to accomplished ones) and different topics to give a quick taste to our new readers. We cover over 100 topics.

We used to post 10% of our daily stories from the ILLUMINATION account, but unfortunately, we have been unable to do so recently due to a hefty reviewing and publishing workload. All our editors are volunteer writers donating their precious time. They focus on reviewing and publishing duties as they check every story and remove harmful content against Medium policies. It is a tedious task for volunteers.

It depends on the reader to answer your question on the term excellent. For example, a story about a writer's stats can be of very little interest to a scientist, but it can be valuable for other writers who want a different perspective. So my point is, yes, these stories are excellent in their categories.

Our goal is to give as many options as possible to a large audience within our capacity.

Preparing these lists takes several hours for our volunteer editors. It is not an automated activity. Medium does not allow us to automate tasks on their platform.

Our goal is to introduce as many great stories of our regular writers to as many readers as possible. This is a free publication service for writers and readers.

I hope this brief overview gives you an idea. You encouraged me to articulate our curation approach in a post.