I clicked into this one, and into the Physics category, to see what it was about. I see that the very same Hossenfelder discussed in this other thread is a regular contributor. So I clicked on one of her recent contributions, an article titled “The End of the Dark Universe?” This article is bad science news for two reasons.
The first is that it is the usual latest-preprint-chasing, headline-optimizing article that plagues a lot of science news. Remember, anyone can post (almost) anything to a preprint server (e.g., arxiv.org), and any media outlet can cover any of those preprints. They can also choose based on how exciting they sound rather than on scientific merits. Good science coverage should not do this. The race to be the first to report on something “exciting” by picking random arxiv.org articles and running with them leads to a terrible signal-to-noise ratio in the science news system. This is a sharp example of that problem. And when one outlet writes about a random article, ten others echo the story, making it seem more news-worthy than it ever actually way. It’s not like any of the outlets are doing their own reviews of the merits of the paper. (The paper in question here has still not passed peer review, and I expect it’s not from lack of trying. There is, however, a peer-reviewed published article outlining in great detail multiple fatal flaws in the proposed theory. If Nautilus had waited another month, they would have seen this and seen what experts had to say about the proposed idea, rather than just running with it because it looks exciting. Irresponsible, IMHO.)
The other reason this is a bad article is that, in the sea of random un-reviewed works out there, this one was (I speculate) chosen by Hossenfelder because it lets her wave one of her favorite flags, MOND, as discussed briefly in the other other thread. I would not want my science news outlet to be a self-serving platform for its contributors. But I may be interpreting the point of the website wrong. If it’s essentially just a blog collective, then I could choose to ignore certain bloggers (if I know to).
In case this was an anomalous example, I clicked on another recent contribution from her, but it was the exact same topic, and just as self-serving. Clicking another contributing author entirely led me to a transcript of an interview with working physicists, which looked harmless and potentially interesting. I didn’t immediately read it.
So, don’t take my comments as reflective of Nautilus as a whole. I sort of cherry-picked a contributor that was already a known concern, and found, well, concerns. But the rest might be great.