I have been conditioned to expect low-effort, surface level, self promotion fluff when I click on a Medium article. The site feels like if Quora and LinkedIn had a baby. I don't know, maybe it's just because I mainly stick to programming posts, and nobody decent is using medium for those anymore (you just can't customize the articles well enough, format code like you want to, have any degree of interactivity). This happened gradually, I didn't always have this association with the site...