The issue is one of lock-in. I think that we here on HN are a reasonable bunch. It's why I like this community. We don't begrudge our local pizza place earning profit off of us for providing us with a service. Similarly, we don't mind people in our own industry earning profit in exchange for a service.

However, when a business involves network effects, the morality changes. If WordPress.com started charging exorbitant fees, cutting off functionality, or putting annoying ads everywhere, I could simply move my blog to any number of other hosts or self-host it and none of my readers would be any the wiser. However, Twitter grew because it offered this liberal, API-driven architecture that allowed tools to flourish and whatnot. Now, we're feeling like we're in a bait-and-switch moment and we can't leave because our followers have followed us on Twitter. If we left, we could no longer connect with them. We're stuck and unless Twitter does something so crappy that we're willing to start over, we have to live with it.

Heck, if Twitter was like this from the beginning, would a competitor have gotten the growth that we gave Twitter? Let's say that Twitter and Jaiku committed to a 15-year feature set as part of a community promise in 2006. Twitter told us as users and prospective users (before we built large follower networks) that they were going to shut down third party access and plaster ads over the feeds while Jaiku told us that they would commit to ensuring third party access, but might run ads. Would we have looked at Twitter and Jaiku and given Jaiku the growth and network?

I know it's unreasonable to ask a company to commit to a 15 year feature set. I'm not suggesting that we have any rights to force Twitter to act how we deem proper. However, when a company creates a lock-in system (like Twitter does with followers) and they perform a bait-and-switch, I think we do have the right to be mildly annoyed and to point out that this might not be the most moral way of acting.

Lock-in allows companies to act against their users in a way we should be against. That doesn't mean we're against profit. For example, there was a pizza place near me that offered a large cheese pizza for $5. It wasn't especially good pizza, but it was $5 and my roommate and I loved it for that. Later, they raised the price to $7.80 (IIRC). I assume it wasn't so profitable at $5. However, at nearly $8, we felt we'd rather pay an additional couple dollars to get better pizza. We didn't begrudge the store their price hike. We didn't feel they owed us cheap pizza. Why? Because they held no power over us. We could re-make our decision as things changed.

For those of us using Twitter, we can't re-make that decision. Twitter got some of us to use their service because of things they're now taking away. Maybe other competitors would have had more traction if Twitter acted this way from the start. But they locked us in and then acted in a way inconsistent to what got them the lock-in. That's bad. It isn't take to the streets bad. It isn't quit the service bad. But it is bad enough to blog and/or comment about.

The issue isn't that we want to deny Twitter the ability to profit. The issue is that Twitter locked us in and now we feel like we don't have other options for that style of communication. Twitter has become a sort-of monopoly over that type of communication and they might start using that monopoly power not to merely become profitable, but to become more profitable than a competitive market would allow - at our expense.

In some ways, it's tough to be a monopolist. Everyone gets to take shots at you. In a competitive market, people generally don't take shots so much because they don't care: they'll just move along to something else that makes them happy. Twitter's changes are making some people unhappy. Maybe no other service could be profitable doing less - that is entirely possible. It's entirely possible that Twitter is being as awesome as possible and that they're nearly saintly in their devotion to their users needs - as much as is humanly and technologically possible. However, we don't and won't know that because of Twitter's lock-in and because of that lock-in, these changes might not feel like Twitter trying to merely continue along and earn a modest profit for its investors, but an exercise of power over us. That sounds more dramatic than I meant it to. I mean, it's Twitter, not the heart surgery that someone needs. Still, it's annoying when we feel someone isn't dealing with us in a square way. When there are loads of competitors, we can say "well, it just costs about that much to get me a pizza." When there's only one competitor, we become less forgiving because monopoly power has been levied against us in the past to our detriment. There are loads of alternatives to 37signals' products. There are loads of alternatives to WordPress.com. There are loads of other local pizza places. The same isn't true of Twitter.