That's basically what sites like Reddit or HN set out to do: aggregate the good articles, using the wisdom of the crowd. Of course that's not that easy, and not necessary what people even want

The wisdom of the crowd quickly gets overwhelmed by the idiocy of the mob.

I agree. Another potential solution is a kind of service that will enable users to look for articles that meet some criteria, and the service could prioritize articles of higher quality. Then you wouldn't need to browse Medium, you'd just look for what you want and the service would recommend quality articles.

Of course the question is always how to properly rank an article's quality. I'd say the best approach is to crowdsource it - develop an algorithm that takes into account how many other highly ranked articles reference a given article, and give a higher rank to articles that have more references.

If you do this, make sure to give the algorithm a clever name. Ideally name it after yourself, unless your name is Smith. You'll never do well with a business built around something called SmithRank.

Now if your last name happened to be something related the things you're ranking, like, say..."Article"...wow, call it ArticleRank!

Just remember you heard it first here on HackerNews.

Yes, good show, PageRank. Slight problem, though -- that measures popularity, which correlates with outrage rather than quality. Then you end up with results full of OAN and CNN.