They made a secret of the ratings system, they were mysterious about the other ways they used our writing, and their customer service was awful. Before that, when, for example, the search engine crashed and we needed to resubmit our profiles to be a part of it, we would learn about it from one another. When I first joined there was a woman whose entire portfolio contained very detailed sexual how-to articles. They had a fantasy that the site would attract non-writing enthusiasts. Of course, with no content-control, this probably did not happen.
Gardeners garden, surfers surf.
The soul of Themestream was in its writers, and there were enough of us to make it happen. Hell, even on my little personal Web site, I can become an Amazon affiliate and participate. They did not advertise writing and editing software. They did not post ads from Office Depot or Reader's Digest. The first one was for scooters from the Sharper Image.