The top writers category isn’t really a quality metric, it’s more of a popularity metric, because it’s based on likes. The articles with most likes goes to the top of the category, and the writer of those top-liked pieces becomes a “top” writer.

A writer who has 10,000 readers is much more likely to get to those top writer spots than a writer with 100 readers, simply because it’s all about the number of ❤s.

That said, some of the categories/tags require fewer ❤s to get to the top than others. When I was writing every day I was a top writer in 5 categories. Some of the “top” articles were not my best writing, they were just the writing that got most ❤s.