To call Quanta "tabloid", even in part, is an unjustified insult for a magazine that aspires, and mostly accomplishes, to bring cutting-edge research to a larger audience (perhaps not "the masses", but still).
Personally, I cherish many articles from Quanta about areas outside my scientific expertise, and most other outlets for popular science writing are too superficial to cater for my background.
I am grateful the Simons Foundation is a supporter of Quanta Mag. - both personally because I enjoy the articles but also because tomorrow's mathematicians or scientists may be motivated/inspired by their material.
I do not believe in charity. This is another datum to add to the list. Don't care about no Simons Foundation. Just don't like the clickbait of quantamagazine. Never got anything out of any of their articles, would much prefer if the original papers got posted here. But I see people like their cheesy science news.
I think posting the original papers here would generally not be useful. I am a scientist, specifically in quantum information theory and I can't read scientific papers in other fields without a significant amount of time and effort. If you show me a paper in cosmology or virology or number theory I'm generally not going to be able to follow it (unless I put in a decent amount of time studying the stuff it's based on).
I think the same is true of almost everyone on this website (maybe we have a couple of polymaths around). Popular science like quanta performs a useful service in making stuff which would otherwise be somewhat inaccessible to me, much much less so.
> would much prefer if the original papers got posted here
I don't think this would generally be useful.
Can you provide an example of a Quanta article you found particularly misrepresentative? I haven't read many of their articles, but the ones I have read seemed pretty decent. They also once asked me to fact-check one of their articles and I was quite impressed with how keen they were to get the science right. Not only did they ask me to read the article and provide any feedback (which is what I expected), but they came with a list of the parts where they were concerned they might have misunderstood something.
Personally, I cherish many articles from Quanta about areas outside my scientific expertise, and most other outlets for popular science writing are too superficial to cater for my background.
I am grateful the Simons Foundation is a supporter of Quanta Mag. - both personally because I enjoy the articles but also because tomorrow's mathematicians or scientists may be motivated/inspired by their material.