Exactly how I feel. I loved Medium when I first discovered it. Good quality content in many different areas. Nowadays it's just a collection of IT students that heard it's a good thing to be blogging to find a job but who aren't good writers and write about non-exciting stuff. On the other hand you find "founders" with (if at all) mediocre startups that recommend you their book list on how to become "successful".

Of course some good writers are still there but they are lost in all this really annoying noise that stopped me from reading medium.

I have noticed the same thing. I have a lot of topics selected there, but my front page is still usually full of 'how to succeed in life' posts even though I even mark those as 'don't show more this kind'.

I think that one of the reasons for that is a bad discovey system. The algorithm that generates front page is oblique and not controllable.

I wish I could decide which people/publications to follow, and be certain that I will not miss their posts. And I would love to discover the content reddit-style, sorting it by number of upvotes and filtering it by tags. Instead, I get recommended a bunch of garbage by some weird machine learning algorithm.

It creates problems for writers as well, because I can never be sure that my followers will read my posts, and the amount of views I receive from Medium, compared to HN/subreddits is truly pathetic.

I really wish they would fix the discovery system, because I'm a huge fan of everything else they're doing and I would love to use Medium as a platform way more.

Have you seen this page? https://medium.com/me/following/tags

Unfortunately this doesn't work well. Reddit works well because you can see the most upvoted posts of alltime/year/month/week/day, and it is extremely convenient and straightforward, it makes it super easy to discover the best content.

The tags only have "top stories", which is obscure, and looks like it works more like a "hot" sorting. I can't see the most upvoted stories to discover the best ones, and at the same time the "top story" in the tag I'm interested in hasn't changed in a long time.

I can neither browse the best stories of all time, nor the best stories published since the last time I've checked. So either way it's basically worthless.

Also, if I follow the popular tags, I'm afraid that the firehose of the new content published in them will bury the new stories published by people whom I explicitly decided to follow.

That is why should be a way to view the posts from the people I follow in the reverse-chronological order, and a completely separate system for discovering the most popular/upvoted posts. As in HN + RSS reader.