I think this largely hits nail on the head. Imagine I was particularly knowledgable about ballpoint pens, and I spent most of my time manufacturing ball point p

I think this largely hits nail on the head. Imagine I was particularly knowledgable about ballpoint pens, and I spent most of my time manufacturing ball point pens. What motivation do I have to spend money to, build, design and host a website, deal with content moderation, work on distribution and SEO optimization and potentially buy ads. If I do this, I might as well expect a return and start selling something, which leads to spam. But if I just want to talk about the finer details of blue ink vs blank ink, and theres a community of ballpoint pen enthusiasts already, it's far easier for me to reply to a couple hundred comments over the course of the year. I don't know where the "open" web goes from here. With moderation getting more and more time consuming I don't blame people for just running to discord where they can properly gatekeep information.