> I can’t think of a realistic business justification for a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly niche hobbies.
meh. I 'member the old phpBB etc. days... it was decent, but once Metasploit and Shodan entered the scene and you could buy DDoS attacks for cheap on the "darknet", the workload got so much harder for operators. Not staying up to date on patches? Your server got pwned in days if not hours - or in the worst case, you'd get someone trying out their newly discovered 0day, and there were lots of these in phpBBs code base. Some troll and/or pissed off user deciding to spend 10$ on a DDoS attack? You got yourself days of fighting cat-and-mouse to keep your server up. And that's before you got into the legally nasty stuff such as people using your board (or your server) to store warez or CSAM, and before "concerned parent" and anti-sex work troll groups made waves panicking about groomers, prostitution and drugs and got incredibly dumb regulations passed, not to mention the newest batch of anti-terror legislation requiring 24h response time throughout the year.
Moderation essentially became a full day job even for small communities and carried significant legal risk, which led many small boards to close shop because a bit of swag, events and occasional donations didn't cover the expenses by far. Reddit in contrast deals with CSAM, DMCA and DDoS stuff paid for by advertising and VC money, so unless you're a corp sub, you don't need paid mods just to keep the lights on.
> These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
Being hosted on a bunch of different boards also meant that the influx of "junk users" was waaaay lower. You had to discover it in the first place, usually by word of mouth, so organized trolls just looking for fights didn't even stumble upon them.
Subreddits in contrast? They get recommended by Reddit these days, right on the frontpage of billions of users. It's on the one side awesome for new niche subreddits, but on the other side it is an insane challenge for the mods of smaller subs to keep up. Once a sub gets recommended to users, work explodes, alone from the countless onlyfans spammers.