While I agree with most of what you said, I have to stick up for the poor rap SEO is getting. It’s still a viable option but you have to know how to do it correctly. Long gone are the days of keyword stuffing. Today, Google likes when a users questions are thoroughly answered. Once you figure out what those are (not hard), and you get the key phrases, words, etc and spatter them about in a way that is organic (not a huge fan of that word), then SEO does work. Many of the articles I’ve written for my job wind up on page one, and it’s because of SEO, well written, engaging (as much as it can be) content created in a user friendly fashion.

Now I need to figure out Medium because I think I want to use it as my personal platform, instead of my basically dead blog.