I’m just not really sure what those other ways to make money could be. Other than monetizing a service outright via a subscription or selling a product to the users, I don’t really see a good way for online social media to be revenue neutral or positive.

This is a good summary of whats going on and why the mods are striking.

Honestly seems like a lot of major sites are imploding. Stackoverflow’s mods are striking, Twitter is on a downward spiral and likely to go bankrupt this year, Reddit is axing itself, etc.

It’ll be interesting to see what ends up happening to the internet after. I think a return to more niche forums or community-run things like lemmy is unlikely to be fully mainstream, but I think enough folks will shake off the major platforms onto these to get them really active.