[CodeyWhizzBang]

For me, it's not that they can't stand up a website, but that there's very little barrier to entry. An article on the New Yorker, say, tends to be better than one on Medium not because the writer can make a website but because they have a strong editorial team that only publish content of a certain quality and edit it to improve it. An article on Medium may not even have been proofread.

[dannyfraser]

I don't think that's a fair comparison. The New Yorker is a magazine that curates and publishes articles by people who write for a living and stakes its reputation on only publishing pieces of a high quality.

The distinction here really is if someone publishes on joesblog.com or on medium.com/joesblog. Both are self-published rather than selected for publication, but the OP was of the opinion that joesblog.com is an indicator of higher quality of content, which I don't think is true. All it indicates is that someone has been able to set up a website.