“Free web services will alter/pivot to suit advertisers and not their customers.”

Therein lies the biggest mistake by most people, they think they are the customer of Twitter, Instagram etc. Like the few early adopters loudly quitting twitter for app.net because of restrictive API changes (that a high 90% of the user base don’t know or even care about), like it would actually make a difference. They are more akin to the commodity, the cattle. No pay, no say, and even then payees has little say as I can remember more than a few Flickr freak outs over the years.

There’s no real happy system unless you pony up and do it all yourself, but people would rather have the instant gratification of Twitter retweets, Facebook likes and Instagram loves. And, sadly, I don’t see much community interaction on Flickr anymore….