There's no incentive to try new services and give feedback if the very next day you are left with nothing, just as there is no incentive to try a service if it is forcing me to pay before so much as a demo or trial period.
The point I'm making isn't that free should stay free, but that if you know that something is going to happen to the service, your users deserve as much of an exit strategy as you do. I knew those surveys I took meant something, whether the site would be shut down or that they were using this data in meetings with potential investors. In one I wrote that I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned and if I should be looking elsewhere.
As someone that used the site multiple times a day and relied on it only because the userbase was growing (evident by the number of people following me increasing exponentially each week), I didn't expect to be left out in the cold. If traction had slowed, I would have gotten the hint, but things seemed to be going somewhere and they were still actively working on it.
This seems similar to EveryBlock's situation in that the problem wasn't that it wasn't useful and growing, just that it wasn't in line with the parent company's vision. Selling it would have made more sense, just as with Snip.it, telling users the site would be shutting down at the end of February would have made a lot more sense than just putting up a static page apologizing and offering very little in the way of "moving on".
There's no incentive to try new services and give feedback
Note that in my original comment I said "... please don't become highly dependent...". By all means you SHOULD try new services, and offer your feedback and suggestions where possible if you think that the site has potential. But understand that it might not be a good idea to get overly invested in a site that does not have a clear ability to maintain its persistence.
If my intent is not to get invested, I'm not going to use it. I look at it, I toy around with it, and I decide whether or not it is applicable to my needs. If it is, I'm going to use it, and the more I use it, the more dependent I become on it. I don't see how not using a service helps anyone on either side of the fence. If I don't 'depend on it' - therefore not use it - it definitely won't continue to exist, free or not.
From the outset, nothing about the site looked like it was going under; they'd recently redesigned, they were adding/changing features, my collections were clearly getting picked up somehow without my assistance, they were still sending their newsletters and highlighting users. There was no way of knowing until the email hit our inboxes that afternoon, just hours after I'd last submitted a link.
The point I'm making isn't that free should stay free, but that if you know that something is going to happen to the service, your users deserve as much of an exit strategy as you do. I knew those surveys I took meant something, whether the site would be shut down or that they were using this data in meetings with potential investors. In one I wrote that I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned and if I should be looking elsewhere.
As someone that used the site multiple times a day and relied on it only because the userbase was growing (evident by the number of people following me increasing exponentially each week), I didn't expect to be left out in the cold. If traction had slowed, I would have gotten the hint, but things seemed to be going somewhere and they were still actively working on it.
This seems similar to EveryBlock's situation in that the problem wasn't that it wasn't useful and growing, just that it wasn't in line with the parent company's vision. Selling it would have made more sense, just as with Snip.it, telling users the site would be shutting down at the end of February would have made a lot more sense than just putting up a static page apologizing and offering very little in the way of "moving on".