Startup culture freaks me the fuck out. I just want to write clean code, then go home and do something other than writing code. I'm not at all interested in giving my life to a project.
Ironically I work for a startup now, but one with a shockingly sane approach to working hours. I specifically asked about that in the interview and it turns out they were telling the truth, they really do care about work life balance.
Medium is just a place where anyone can throw anything up there and have a potential of get linked to.
The challenge is how to enforce quality despite the surge in users.
My counter suggestion is to encode the culture you desire in to the function of the site.
Unfortunately, since it opened up to the public, it's turned into something akin to a cross between an inspiring cliches platform, a marketing tool and a place for people to complain about things on social media sites.
From my perspective, I don't quite get a lot of the points. No unit-tests? Most code bases don't have them. Cucumber tests? You're already ten giant leaps ahead of most products out there.
Code in disarray? Used to it for every single project I have to come into. Factories/viewers at least there is some semblance of structure!
False corporate goals? It's a company, I expect nothing else from them.
Weird North Korea chants? That's just weird as hell.
Again, I don't work in SF or NY so it's hard to know what exists within startup culture, but to me all of this just sounds like the norm. There is much less importance placed on decent code then there is on just getting something out.