He's not really talking about where you write. He's just talking about changing expectations for writing. They're independent ideas.

Also, it's a canard that Medium gives you a larger audience. Even if everybody is there, everybody isn't going to be reading what you wrote.

Bottomline: smaller targeted audience > larger unfocused audience. Step 1: write about what you find interesting. Step 2: find your homies and show it to them. They're hard to find, but they aren't captive to any single gatekeeper.

I feel some nostalgia for the days when I visited individual blogs and web sites, but I think there are practical reasons they aren't a focal point for community any more.

First, stability: Blogging and maintaining a web site are big time commitments, and most people who make a great site or a great blog fade as their interests and commitments change. Sites like Reddit or Hacker News tend to have a longer useful life than sites built by an individual or a handful of individuals.

Diversity: A blog can have guest contributors, but if you want real dissent, you have to go to the comments, and that's something blogs don't do well. Reddit and Hacker News have their orthodoxies and groupthink, but various opposing viewpoints are present as well. In addition, there are diversities of perspective, back end versus front end, social media startup versus Wall Street finance, that increase the range of discussion.

Efficiency: A successful blogger or website creator knows that they have to give their visitors a complete experience, as well as regular updates. That can translate into a lot of fluff. You can't just say the new thing you learned. You have to create context, make a few jokes, draw out your point so it has time to sink in before your readers move on. On Reddit or Hacker News, effort goes towards the opposite: boiling down your point to make it quickly understandable in the context of the discussion. This comes naturally to most people — it's a lot like oral conversation in groups - so you don't need to have special writing skills (or the time, taste, and expertise to insert stock photos and periodically refresh your site design) like you do for blogging. That reduced barrier attracts participation from people who don't have the time or inclination to make a blog post but might drop a quick experience bomb in a comment.

Different tools for different purposes: A blog or niche web site used to be a platform for publishing short writing, a place for readers to discover new things, and a forum for community discussion. Now, Twitter and sites like Reddit and HN are where we discover things, and Reddit and Hacker News are where we discuss them. As a result, you don't even need a consistent place to publish your thoughts. You can publish them anywhere that can render them in a readable way to people who follow links from Twitter or HN. People who used to use a blog as a way of cultivating a durable identity on the web have various social media platforms to choose from.

I think blogs and niche web sites will continue to exist, because people will still have needs that they meet best, but I think overall we benefit by letting them be replaced by a loose collection of specialized services.