It didn't get downvoted; medium.com is in a class of websites that get mildly penalized by default pending moderator review. Not a great solution, but the alternative is reams of blogspam and fluff making the front page just because so much of it gets posted. We remove the penalty from solid articles (and typically reset the clock on them to restore a fair time window for upvotes), but it sometimes takes a while before that happens.

In the long run we intend to have the community do most of this, but finding and implementing the right mechanisms for that is a lengthy process.