"you can stop using their service if you dont like it." That's exactly what they said they were doing: Did you actually read the post? They discovered a shady

"you can stop using their service if you dont like it." That's exactly what they said they were doing: Did you actually read the post? They discovered a shady, poorly communicated "feature" had been enabled, so they dropped the service. As ryguytilidie says below, it is bizarre that behaviours like this are defended, and it needs to become less acceptable of a business life-cycle strategy. I'll point a bit of the finger at the host himself, PG, as he has oft stated that you don't need to concern yourself with revenue, but rather eyeballs. That is inevitably a bait and switch -- get them in on a clean, simple commenting system, sneak ads in (with hilariously misleading emails that they know no one will actually read) later on.