This space has turned into a mess, there are so many options now that it's all meaningless. What happened to simply hosting your own blog and building a brand that way? Instead we have gazillions of for profit, ad driven channels that essentially offer the same as a 2005-era wordpress blog in terms of functionality.

I get that a small portion of authors is actually looking to monetize via these platforms but the vast majority don't make a penny on their content and nor are they looking to. So that's not the main driver. As for quality control on these platforms, aside from some censorship, there is none. It's exactly the same type of content you'd find on blogs, Facebook, Linkedin, or wherever else people choose to voice their opinion. So, that's not it either.

I think it's a combination of couple of things:

- Analytics, likes, and feedback & commenting. Most of these platforms have like buttons and give you some notion of success and ways to interact. Everything a wannabe influencer needs basically. Blogs used to have similar features but those got targeted by blog spam. So, people turned off a lot of this stuff because it was just too painful to deal with. I don't think blogs ever recovered from losing that functionality. It's just a bit bare-bones these days. You can fix it if you know what you are doing but out of the box, you have none of it.

- Convenience and safety. Most people don't want to maintain servers or play web admin and they don't want to worry about doing the right things technically (assuming they are capable of that even). They just want to write and hit publish and be done with it. It's an important feature and it's why things like Facebook and Linkedin became popular. Better distribution and low hassle. Medium never really became an important distribution platform. You always have to post your Medium links somewhere else to get an audience.

- Community. These platforms for better or worse function like mini social networks with readers and authors connecting. It's of course a very fragmented space and there are tiny disconnected social clusters all over the internet now. Blogs used to offer a similar experience but there's not much happening there anymore except for a few holdouts. The blogosphere (I hesitate to use the word) is kind of dead.

- Distribution. To get your content some eyeballs, you need to promote it on multiple platforms. This has changed a lot over time. It used to be that you would have followers that would pick up anything you wrote from your RSS feed and then would distribute that to their readership. These days that's less of a thing and you need to distribute via one of the big social networks. Medium as a distribution platform is not that important. You still need the big social networks to share a link on. Not much difference with a self hosted blog.

With Medium, there's definitely a problem. The platform is now so pushy towards it's readers that I can't justify parking any content there. Just not worth it. I've used dev.to on and off for some articles and I kind of liked that experience and I appreciate the community there. I tend to cross post on my own website still. But altogether it's far less often than I used to blog.