I think the age of everyone having their own domain running their own code is starting to expire, just like the age of running your own email server. There's just too much spam and bad actors out there, you have to prove your site innocent to the big indexes before you can get anywhere. If you publish on Medium, Facebook, Blogspot, or another platform that has "rep", people assume the spam is filtered out by the platform, and they treat your content less skeptically.
Turns out AOL had the right idea the whole time -- people want platform-specific keywords and they want to trust the platform's caretakers to decide what's OK for them to see.
Turns out AOL had the right idea the whole time -- people want platform-specific keywords and they want to trust the platform's caretakers to decide what's OK for them to see.