I'm not sure what they expect...we've all seen it happen with social-media, it starts out all open and free, and then investors get involved and soon enough people have already moved on to the next open and free alternative. 4chan is the only exception to this rule. But if 4chan somehow got transformed into a for-profit service, then things have already gotten very bad.
In general, all for-profit social media or similar operations will have the same fate. The term for this is "enshittification". While HN is owned by a company, it isn't being used as a profit generating service, even though it technically has some job ads, so it is (so far) immune from this.
We must find a solution to sustain non-profit user-generated content operations to continue enjoying the benefits of an open online community. Forums went of fashion as they required too much technical expertise to operate and to a lesser extent to use, so they got displaced by reddits and discords, both of these are distinctly worse from a data sovereignty and user freedom perspective. In the age of smartphones, density of information (esp. text) seems to be frowned upon.
I'm not sure what's the solution is. "Making your own platform" doesn't work because people's time is limited, and they inevitably gravitate toward the biggest platforms, taking all the attention and mindshare with them. Is federation the answer? Perhaps, as it seems to bring down the operation costs to a reasonable level, but it seems to pose other problems with content curation, which is a hard problem.
if you need relational modeling have people run it themselves on something like supabase