Someone told me that "It's called Medium because the articles are neither rare, nor well-done."

That seems accurate in my experience.

That quote is definitely not original, and I believe was originally applied to TV (i.e., TV as a medium, singular form of media). (See the origins here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/24/tv/)

I mean, not knocking who told you that at all, I think it's funny that they applied it to Medium the website. Just a little tidbit of info about the quote's origins, in case you weren't aware!

Ah, I wasn't aware at all. I thought the joke was made about the website!

Medium has for me become a signal for "likely shallow and low quality".

Whats for you the signal for high quality?

A book usually signals a quality higher than Medium signals.

Given the nature of the medium, books usually have the highest guarantee of quality due to the resources used to publish a book.

I usually search for documentation or tech problems in a text browser with cookies disabled, no js, no css, using tor and using an empty user agent.

I won't try to guess why, but the few pages I can access are always high quality, while poor quality pages (as discovered when opening the page anyway in a full browser) always try to block that setup.

You can usually tell from skimming the blog post / looking back at the author's history of posts - it's hard to put it into words.

I suspect quality means different things to different people and even changes based on context for the same person.

For instance, a blog describing some arcane linux command to run to fix the issue you're having does not need to be the same level of quality as something you're reading to learn + get in depth info about a topic you know at a very shallow level.

Sharing experts knowledge, not copying stackoverflow answer adding sentence from official docs and one screen long picture on top of the post.

Usually you can find the signal in the first 2 or 3 sentences of in any post.

Medium.com has better SEO than SO and small personal blogs, so it's winning when searching for a solution.

No single thing unfortunately. But as an example in contrast to Medium, articles published on github.io with simple HTML often seem to be a bit higher quality.

.edu

Ding ding ding. Medium cultivated a Google presence and is now cashing in with crap content to rival Quora.

This is becoming a problem Internet-wide. Too many people are more interested in becoming Internet Famous than becoming actually good programmers/engineers/etc...

Just this morning I was thinking of making a search engine that only looks among personal blogs plus a whitelist of sites like stackoverflow and Wikipedia. Or something like the old web in general. Or it has to be non profit (no ads, no subscription options, no paid content, only donation/flattr if anything). I haven't decided on a good rule yet, it's quite tricky.

At any rate, the idea is to somehow filter out all the garbage when I just want to know how to do something. Too often I have to find personal blog links on stackoverflow ("PS. I wrote more about it here") as opposed to that helpful article simply showing up in the search results by itself.

You'll probably like Million Short (https://millionshort.com/) then, a search engine that can filter out the most popular websites.

This is pretty nice. It's effectively working as a blocklist from top domains.

It would be interesting to see a curated version with an allowlist of domains as well, like how Angelfire and friends in the 90s used to be with a "web ring" of peer websites.

Yep. The genuinely useful stuff is never coming from Medium/Twitter personalities. Instead I often find it on obscure Blogspot sites with a few posts per year, with archives going back to 2006 or so. That's where you find content from actual good engineers. Leave the Twitter e-celeb drama to the plebs, and Medium to the CV-filler fluff.

Because people see writing a blog or guest articles as a sign of possible expertise, but are generally too time crunches to check for themselves.

this is a general statement.

I have found several articles about Apache Kafka on Medium that have helped me a lot. I have no idea if it's by a junior dev or not.

Isn't that the point of most blogs?

I don't think they geniunely want to help people learn. I assume, given the low quality / effort content, that most are just trying to use them to build a prescence to help get jobs?

It's cargo cult career management.

People see successful programmers giving lots of talks and writing lots of articles.

People want to be successful.

Monkey see, monkey do.