The problem being, social aggregations are essentially regulated by convention, meaning, by a network of trust, which in turn requires a minimum of stability. The lesson to be learned from this adventure is really about stability and how social aggregations and their wider sphere (i.e., advertisers) react, when you pull this stability without providing sufficient reasons for this. Mind that this wasn't a fresh start-up, but an already established community (or, to be precise, a bundle of communities that somehow had grown to tolerate each other to a certain extent as long as they sticked to some unwritten conventions.)