I don't know. I can only guess that it's because it was created by two college students with the intent of allowing people to share interesting content with eac

I don't know. I can only guess that it's because it was created by two college students with the intent of allowing people to share interesting content with each other (a pet project), and then became more popular than they could ever have imagined. Server costs went up in order to keep the site alive, and investors saw the potential and subsidized those costs, and everything ticked along swimmingly until the investors became impatient. Again, this is just speculation.