You're right, they aren't trying to make something sustainable. I guess I was giving them too much credit when I said that.

The problem they're facing here is that if they can't sustain even the appearance of a functioning site that investors might want to buy, then they fail at that too.

So maybe the best way to fix this is just to ride it out and not close the subs, but if they're just full of users that have finally clocked why mods are needed and that the place sucks now, that's also a bad look.

If the search engines start to realise that it's a cesspit with nothing worth linking to anymore, then that really hits their metrics. I've just realised I really need to get onto downloading my posts and deleting them.