Communities vs. Blogs

I mentioned recently that I've been trying to weigh the relative merits of posting in a community or posting to a blog. So... I thought I'd start with a pros/cons list in stream-of-consciousness order. Here's my first draft:

Attribute	Blog	Community
Improve SEO	X	-
Moderated	-	X
Subscribers feed	-	X
Meaningful first tag	X	-
Post pinning	-	X
Curator support	x	X
Post promotion	X	X

Off the top of my head, I came up with 7 relevant attributes that an author might consider when posting and listed out whether a community or blog/tag would be preferred for each attribute. This is shown in the table above and the figure to the right.

Here are some brief thoughts on each attribute.

1.) Improve SEO

As described by @the-gorilla, here, community tags of the format "hive-######" don't help SEO rankings much, whereas a relevant tag does. Therefore, if an author is looking for readers outside of the Steem ecosystem, the blog/tag approach would be preferred.

2.) Moderated

In communities, moderators can mute off topic posts which means that posts in a community should be less likely to be surrounded by spam when viewed by tag.

3.) Subscribers feed

Posts in a community will appear in the feeds of the community's subscribers, regardless of whether or not those subscribers follow the author. At present, it's not possible to follow a non-community tag. Therefore, if an author is looking for readers inside the Steem ecosystem, a community approach would be preferred.

4.) Meaningful first tag

When the first tag is "hive-######", this doesn't tell the reader anything about the post. So lists of posts by tag are not very informative when community tags are in the mix.

5.) Post pinning

It's possible to pin a post near the top of a community, which gives an author more possibilities for visibility. Again, authors looking for readers inside the Steem ecosystem would prefer communities. (edited to add*: On the other hand, post pinning can almost become a form of SPAM when moderators overdo it.)

6.) Curator support

Curator support is available for both blog/tags and for communities, but some communities also have dedicated high-power curators, so the community gets an edge here. Of course, it's also possible for tags to have dedicated curation, but - as far as I know - that's not currently happening.

7.) Post promotion

I don't see an advantage to either tag type. It's possible to promote blog articles and community articles. Unless someone is using something like mod-bot to link post promotion and pinned posts, this is a draw.

Summary

So, it seems that the community approach would be preferable in most cases. The only time that the blog approach has an advantage is if an author is looking to show up in search engines and pull in readers from other platforms.

This is not necessarily a good thing for the blockchain, since the author's incentive, in most cases, is to downrank their own content for search engines. I see three possible ways to address this suboptimal incentivization:

1. Curators can favor tags over communities in order to realign the authors' incentives; and/or
2. Some sort of metadata can be added so that the first tag in a community isn't the owning account. Instead, each community owner could register a relevant (unique) tag that would be used as the first tag when people post in their communities; and/or
3. Enable following of tags.

Thoughts? What am I missing?