As was once said of a computer magazine, but is really an evergreen observation about all business media:

“The publication is packed full of advertisements, some of which are clearly labeled as such.”

What a great insight. Thank you for sharing.

It's a great place to follow high quality individual writers instead of publications. For example one of my favorite finance writers: https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/

Terry Crowley's posts on Windows/Office (where he ran engineering) are well worth reading: https://medium.com/@terrycrowley

The quality of the content is definitely hit and miss, with more seeming to be the latter. The problem with mediums (no pun intended) is that at some point the source becomes popular, which does gain the benefit of reaching a wider audience. The downside is that with that popularity comes noise. The noise is often comprised of a clickbait title with poor quality content. I would say that it suffers from the same issue that StackOverflow has, which is that it loses its effectiveness as the user base grows.

I'd say the problem is more that at some point, every site/service/platform becomes attractive for SEO/marketing purposes, bringing in tons of shysters looking for a quick buck. It's the same reason virtually every tech and webmaster forum on the internet is absolutely terrible; because all the spammers join and post crap en masse to try and build up a few backlinks/getting themselves seen as 'authorities'.

Just look at Sitepoint, Digitalpoint, virtually every web development and marketing subreddit, Warrior Forum, etc.

That's what killed Medium. Everyone started promoting it as a get rich quick scheme/easy way to market your work, so the spammers, marketers and morons came in.

The only way to avoid this issue is to heavily moderate the platform with a zero fluff/spam tolerance rule, and to boot out anyone trying to game the system.

Publications, no not really. Pretty much all of them are the worst kind of 'life hack' stuff you can think of, with their barrier to entry often being non existent.

It's pretty much why I stopped posting my work to said publications, since I realised their quality was falling so much that sites like Hacker News and Reddit had banned the publication's domain.

That said, there are decent writers there. You just have to really know where to look, since the front page/newsletters/archives are a bloody smorgsaboard of reprinted mass media articles and pointless puff pieces from social media influencers.

I definitely saw some interesting pieces of UX design and usability there, and obviously the latest Silicon Valley controversy will probably first come to light there too. So meaningful stuff exists, it's just heavily buried under tides of crap.