[smacktoward]

This is a natural consequence of the "build an audience first, figure out how to monetize it later" business model.

At the beginning, the service does all sorts of nice things in order to attract users. These things all cost money, but nobody cares at that stage because they're burning other peoples' money and building the userbase is Priority 1.

Eventually the other peoples' money runs out and the service has to be sustainable on its own. That means it suddenly matters a lot that all those nice things the service did to attract users cost money. The nice things get cut, of course. But the users have all now gotten used to having them, so when they disappear, people start screaming.

As long as we build our businesses around the idea of getting big first and worrying about how to make them sustainable later, this pattern will continue repeating itself.