[rchaud]

Even with advertising, Google Ads (then called AdSense) was a lot more generous with their revenue share than they are now. Lots of little blogs and forums thrived because the money coming in was enough to keep the proprietors interested in maintaining a community of commenters.

Then comment bot spam started growing out of control, webmasters ceded the comment platform to centralized services like Disqus, and finally Google slashed ad premiums, so websites either started disappearing or getting folded into the properties of 'blog networks' and lost their personality in search of pageviews.