So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve).
It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).
God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and charge a fair price for it; payment processing with a small blog platform is not rocket science. No part of this requires 60 million dollars and 100+ employees[2].
[1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/12/08/patreon-fees-con...
If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
https://www.businessinsider.com/craig-newmark-craigslist-fou...
Also profits pay for non of the things you listed, profits pay for investors.
/snark since it's mostly invisible on the internet.
