Not OC, but it seems like the niche quanta occupies is letting non-mathematicians try to give analogies to help explain research mathematics to a lay audience.

There are problems with this.

1) there is no such thing as explaining research mathematics to a lay audience. At most you walk away with a feeling, and some cool buzzwords.

2) The algorithm quanta writers follow to layify mathematics is roughly to layify definitions without the oversight of someone who knows whether they've broken the essence of that definition. they do this a couple of times and its guaranteed that the layified version bears no resemblance to the reality.

3) the human interest element (which is always 10 times more coherently written than the explanation of the research, because this is what the quanta journalists can actually do without expertise) ends up being the point. Since the biographical snippets are the hook, they end up acting more like a freak show for living mathematicians (many of whom are quite weird!).

This is not, I think, good for mathematics as a whole.

oh, here you are!

ok, for me it's a strange hybrid of pop-science with some newyorker style storytelling which seems to be written in a way for reader to somehow enjoy just an amount of words used. I love reading scientific news, but I'm not sure what's so interesting about what kind of coffee drinks specific scientist behind it and what is their morning routine. And when I skip over that stuff, actual description of the discovery in question is seriously lacking in details, at least to my taste.

This is me too, it’s a great source of news for areas of science that I’m not an expert in but am curious about.