Personally, it became too much of a hassle to maintain. Comment spammers would whale on your comment systems, so you either shut them off or offloaded to some third party. If you ran Google ads it always seemed to take more effort to stay in Google's good graces than you’d actually earn. The one month I earned $200 Google suspended my ads account over seemingly trivial issues (that had been on the site for…years). If you wrote anything slightly controversial you got to be the target of people who really, truly, believe the worst thing in the world is to have an opinion different from theirs and your job should be forfeit as a result. Or maybe your life.In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.
At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.
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