"It's a lot of work to maintain a high quality bar for a website, which is hard to qualify if nobody's getting paid to do that (and just generally tricky: do they throw people out if they don't agree with the quality?). For you, this means you're basically opening up shop on a site that's filled with - potentially - problematic "flatmates"."
"This makes it harder for search engines & co to understand the overall value of the site - is it just like the others, or does it stand out in a positive way? On a domain name of your own you stand on your own, with its pros and cons. (And with a domain of your own, I'd also watch out for the super-cheap TLDs, which come with similar hurdles.)"
"You're publishing content on a topic that's already been extremely well covered. There are sooo many sites out there which offer similar things. Why should search engines show yours? There's sooo much competition out there, with people who have worked on their sites for more than a decade, many of them with professional web-oriented backgrounds. Yes, sometimes a "new take" on an "old topic" makes sense, but then I'd expect that users would recognize that and link to your site, even sending direct traffic."
Free subdomain hosting services attract a lot of spam and low-effort content that lowers overall site quality. Maintaining a high quality bar is difficult when moderation and curation are not incentivized, which can leave a domain populated by problematic neighbors. Shared domains with many low-quality sites make it harder for search engines to assess individual site value and to differentiate higher-quality content. Owning a distinct domain reduces those network effects, though super-cheap TLDs can present similar risks. Publishing on oversaturated topics faces intense competition from long-established, professionally built sites and typically requires time and unique value to earn links and traffic.
Read at Search Engine Roundtable
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