Apologies for the attack, couldn’t resist. However, what you wrote is common sense and you should assume that anyone lurking around on HN knows that stuff. I mean you actually described the page rank algorithm which was the foundation of Google but there are many more signals nowadays. So your post felt like a (small) attack too.
FYI, Google runs quite a large spam team which flags scammy sites manually. Sites with such a modal are usually rather on the spammy side of life and gets flagged by the team. If you get too many flags you get severe penalties slowly eating your traffic in a way that it’s not clearly obvious and it can take years to recover.
But since it’s Medium such UI seems to be tolerated.
If I ran that team I would have killed Medium's, Quora's and Pinterest's search traffic. And soon maybe StackOverflows as well.
Certainly not my intent. I come across stuff like GGP and I have a gut reaction "Oh! I know a thing! Here, see what I know?! I am helpful!"
I do this occasionally at work, too: where I explain something fundamental to people who have been doing the work for 20+ years.
Part of it is that I'm reinforcing my mental model, and part is I'm trying to be helpful. I suppose this can come across as patronizing or insulting. That's never my intent. I try not to assume what people do or don't know, because I don't know quite a lot and the asides that people make are super helpful to me (especially in fields that I know nothing about).
