That doesn't matter though if you're losing money. The early imgur was simple and popular, but, as the parent said, lost money. Who would host a system that lo

That doesn't matter though if you're losing money. The early imgur was simple and popular, but, as the parent said, lost money. Who would host a system that loses money? Similarly, I could have a website called yougetadollar.com where people put in their address and I mailed them a dollar. It might be a really simple site that fulfills it's core purpose efficiently - but if I don't figure out a way to make money of it, I'm going to have to stop hosting it sometime. If someone came along with a way to make money off yougetadollar.com and that method involved adding a lot of JavaScript, and registrations, and upvotes, and advertising - you'd be correct that it makes the website worse for what people want to use it for, but if the alternative is losing money and shutting down - I don't see the point of the observation.