Right, it's so ridiculous to the point of being laughable almost. Imgur took the same route. It started off as a super simple image hosting service because every other one was full of all sorts of annoying garbage, and now Imgur's Google description is "imgur: The magic of the Internet // Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered entertainment destination." and has more annoying garbage than almost every other image host out there.

Is there some kind of term for this phenomenon? Web apps like Medium and Imgur created with the sole intention of giving you a no-bullshit, clean, straightforward, minimalistic UI and presentation mutating into horrifying abominations that then go out of their way to fill everything with as much bullshit as humanly possible. Are they just typical cases of starting out idealistic, getting investment due to rapid growth despite no solid path to profitability, later frantically realizing it's totally financially unsustainable, and then doing a complete 180 to satisfy investors / not have to shutter the company?