The whole thing feels very "old school Internet" in a way - a bunch of misfits with a manifesto and an intentionally simple website.

It sounds like they were never able to bridge the gap of turning the casual interest of folks expressing their counter-culture into enough money to survive. To their credit, it's much better to recognize when they did that the utopian experiment wasn't a viable business, than to try to drag more funds out of folks to keep it on life-support.