There are a couple of advantages to places like Medium, Facebook, or Quora over a normal website.
The first is branding -- you get what you expect from a site. FB for personal connections (memes or distraction for others), curated content for Medium & Quora, etc. I remember using the web back in the 90s or so. I had committed to memory a dozen sites or so that I would visit every day. Slashdot, Yahoo News, ScaryGoRound etc. It was a bit stressful. Now I can just go to Reddit and just get distracted by whatever. Even curating your own Reddit experience is difficult, like it was for RSS. Most viewers of Reddit don't really create an account.
The second is ease of use for publishers. I'm not going to set up a website, even a Wordpress blog now if I can just go post content on Reddit or Medium where I have a chance of people reading it.
For Medium, I get what I expect: Some annoying "we've seen you here before" banner covering up the whole page. That usually doesn't happen for personal web pages.
There are a couple of advantages to places like Medium, Facebook, or Quora over a normal website.
The first is branding -- you get what you expect from a site. FB for personal connections (memes or distraction for others), curated content for Medium & Quora, etc. I remember using the web back in the 90s or so. I had committed to memory a dozen sites or so that I would visit every day. Slashdot, Yahoo News, ScaryGoRound etc. It was a bit stressful. Now I can just go to Reddit and just get distracted by whatever. Even curating your own Reddit experience is difficult, like it was for RSS. Most viewers of Reddit don't really create an account.
The second is ease of use for publishers. I'm not going to set up a website, even a Wordpress blog now if I can just go post content on Reddit or Medium where I have a chance of people reading it.
There are other things like consistent UX, etc.