I agree. They have a breathless tone to them that's quite annoying to me (I work in data compression as an academic, and I found this article uninspiring.)
By the way, there was an old Soviet magazine called "Kvant" (Russian for Quantum, I think). I do not know Russian, but I have 2 collected volumes of selected articles from them. [1] [2] Their quality is astonishingly good, and high-level. The difference is this:
The Kvant articles were written by professional research mathematicians, trying to present their ideas to an audience that were willing to follow them with pencil and paper in hand.
Quanta magazine articles are written by journalists trying to present advanced science to a lay audience - the articles are very stilted and present the articles in a tone that oversimplifies the problem and gives no idea about the actual solution, and uses hackneyed tropes like : oh look the solvers were just some random unknown guys (in a recent case, the random unknown guy is a tenured faculty at UCLA in theoretical computer science, apparently "a world away from mathematics" [3])
I think this is an unfair criticism of the Quanta articles.
I'll just say up front that I am not an academic, and I enjoy the breadth of coverage in the Quanta articles. I would liken them to science articles in American Scientist. (Perhaps you don't like that either.) Yes, they are popularized, but they are still technical.
Are you bored by a description of an algorithm you know well? This article clearly describes the process of Huffmann encoding. It's not one of the most amazing discoveries, but is this topic ever going to be exciting? I'd say it's easier to follow their article than either Wikipedia or the top animation hit [1].
There are two other claims you make that appear baseless.
On the first point:
> Quanta magazine articles are written by journalists
The first bio I checked [2] is a Ph.D. mathematician. If they also write, that does not make them less qualified. I'll grant that the second bio I checked [4] was "only" a journalist, but the third was a professor in a named chair [5]. Just clicking, not searching for examples.
On the second point:
> oversimplifies the problem and gives no idea about the actual solution
In your reference [3], it describes the problem clearly and devotes several paragraphs to what looks like a sketch of a solution. Certainly it outlines the ingredients used. (Search for "To see how they arrived at their new upper limit." and "In their proof [...]".)
I haven't seen Kvant, but it's worth adding that Scientific American up till maybe the mid-80s was also more real than standard pop science. Don't take its current incarnation as much like its past. (I guess the 70s were even better for it, but this is my fuzzy memory of a trove of back issues I went through in the 80s.)
That said, from a skim I wouldn't call this particular article standard pop science: it explains an idea/result rather than spending most of its words on periphera, and the subject is not recent news. It does ask less of the reader than an old Sci Am article would, I think.
Yeah you have a good point - not sure if there’s a name for what you’re referencing but it’s tough to be an expert in something and read a bunch of cringe pop sci articles on your field. This topic comes up frequently with my partner who is a researcher - Ed Yong recently wrote a piece on some work by their lab and it was “tolerable”.
Not a huge fan of Quanta myself but Aeon frequently has articles written by researchers/experts and are higher quality in my opinion.
> "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
> but because they do it badly, and the clickbait is insufferable
Well, then, who does pop science "right"?
There's no shortage, of course, of 30+ page review articles on every scientific topic imaginable. And if someone has a few days, a freshly minted STEM degree or years of related experience, and a compelling interest in the topic, they can just pick up one of these review articles and go to town.
But that isn't going to fly for the general public, not even close. And not just because of the mathematics, dry passive-voice language, lack of context, times new roman, and gratuitous expert jargon. It's just too much.
I must say, there is no written media that I know of that pleases me. Of course, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
I much prefer the treatment from some YouTubers, such as Sabine Hossenfelder (to name just one).
It's far from dry, she has a wicked sense of humour, she tries her best to be impartial (and sometimes fails), and makes it clear when something she says is her opinion.
PBS also has a ton of good content.
Of course, all these actually require the viewer to make an effort, but if you're not ready to do that, then a poorly written clickbait article is likely to do more harm than good anyways.
I like Quanta! They explain things accurately and in detail, with helpful figures and diagrams. They did go wrong a few months ago with the "quantum computer black hole" article, but the heat they recieved was precisely because it fell well below their usual standards, which are otherwise well above other "pop science" sites in my experience.
quanta's tone does get mildly annoying at times, but the actual content of the articles is usually excellent, and this one is no exception. I suspect you disliked it simply because you already knew most of what it had to say. (I mean sure, the writer is no Martin Gardner, but then again who is.)
(Not because popular science is bad, but because they do it badly, and the clickbait is insufferable)