I'm not sure that's true. No one is paying the moderators currently. It's not like hosting costs of a forum are that high. Not that difficult to migrate all your users to a competing service if the community is un happy with the monetization scheme.

Migrating might not be that hard. Retaining existing users and attracting new users is much harder.

For niche topics I tend to add "reddit" to google search queries, because there's a high likelihood of finding actual information. If those subreddits move to other services, they may not even show up in the sea of blogspam results.

> Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them.

And this very article embarassingly shows that after 16 years it is still investors who are funding those specialized communities.

How much money does it really cost to provide a discussion forum for a specialized community? Not so much as to warrant advertising pollution.

Advertising is diametrically opposed to information sharing.

Not necessarily how much it costs but more how much the provider wants to make. And w/ VCs involved in Reddit they're not looking for pennies.