I kind of wish I had a better idea about the finances for a lot of these applications. Back in the "fun" days part of the reason they were fun was because they

I kind of wish I had a better idea about the finances for a lot of these applications. Back in the "fun" days part of the reason they were fun was because they didn't need to worry about making money. As they started to try and bring in modes of revenue extraction, they started to feel more user hostile (either in terms of gates and paywalls, excessive ads, or really creepy levels of data harvesting). But I'm curious if another path was ever available. My gut feeling is that many (not all) of these products probably had perfectly serviceable business models available to them if they were content to just be a fairly unsexy utility with low margins. But the focus on establishing a platform monopoly and/or being a billion dollar unicorn has pushed them all towards these societally maladaptive ways approaches that kind of put people off the whole thing. I don't have the numbers to back any of that up, though, and I'm not sure anyone does aside from the VC people. But they, understandably, have no incentive to let someone stay in the 7 or 8-figure revenue range when they can push them to add an extra comma instead.