[rob_b]

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.

[CM30]

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.