they had such a good thing going, too

Two things drove this feature frenzy. One was a very strong engineering organization that constantly had to crank out new features to justify the type of talent on the team. You don’t go after big shot developers and engineers just to have them fix bugs all day. The second was a marketing team addicted to chasing short term revenue from new members instead of better enabling power users to generate that revenue for them.

It was a shame to constantly read in the forums things like, “That feature is great, but X is still broken and I can’t create products.” or, “Great, another promotion that’s going to further mess up the economy and make me lose money”.

I still converse with a friend who works that that company. Things haven’t changed one bit since I left and they still wonder why they continue to lose their best users. Oh, and the newest revenue generator? Not making the product work better. Not getting the community more involved. They decided to throw ads up all over the site. Joy.