@AndyS Re: Good parting advice
"The risk/reward analysis must be pretty complex. "
I wouldn't think so. The typical user represents an increment of income very close to, but not quite, zero. Any time and effort whatsoever that is spent on supporting the customer means that the customer instantly (see what I did there?) becomes, not an almost-negligible amount of net income, but a net expenditure.
Of course, that's probably only true for those companies that actually turn a profit. Few of them seem to do so. In that case, each customer would be assumed to represent a loss, pure and simple.
Interestingly, as I believe that Instagram, like all of these shitty social networks, runs in the red, it could well be the case that the more popular a user is, the greater an expense he represents.
Although the saying was coined long before the internet came into existence, there is no place where it is truer: "Sure we lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
