And then there's the sheer volumn they push out every day. When I was an editor over there it ewas nothing for me to push out 100 a day by myself. The amount of submissions was ridiculous. I would encourage writers to pull their submissions and then resubmit to one of the other pubs under the Illum umbrella. Some would make the switch, others would not. The ones who didn't got buried.

If you're one of the first 10 I hit Publish on then the other 90 are going to push your story to the bottom.

Don't get me started about the "quality". Like you said, it's good as a beginning writer but it isn't where you want to call home. I chose 5 pubs with a few hundred to 1000 followers each and divided up my work among them. 5 pubs x 200 sets of eyes = more followers than I had at the time. Now I'm down to basically 1 pub that I submit to and that's it.