That site has basically good content with awful ads, competitive sites tend to have less bad ads but poorly written content that is formatted like puke. That site contributes a lot to what my RSS reader shows me, at least 70% of the time I substitute a link to the paper if it is open access [1] or if is a syndicated story [2] I go to the original or another syndicated site, etc. It is not just me, phys.org and other sites in it networks are some of the most submitted sites to HN.

What can I say? Freedom isn’t free.

[1] usually that means the phys.org title is “Scientists came to an important conclusion” but the original article’s title is “We measured something”

[2] AP wire stories also get syndicated on local news sites that “look like puke” but might support RSS, PR sites from national labs and universities may or may not “look like puke” but they never support RSS (wouldn’t even bother asking the folks who do PR at my Uni they are as likely to answer my email from my work email as the profs who write articles about how “food at the food bank is as good as any other food” when I ask them “why do these canned peaches from the food bank have a prop 65 warning?”