So people signed up for Instagram under their old terms, where everything quite literally did come to them for free. Now Instagram changed their terms to monetize peoples content. People don't like this and would not have joined originally with these terms. People STILL mock them for "expecting something for free".
Well, when you create the expectation, as Instagram did, that things will come for free, and then you stop fulfilling that expectation, customers will leave. Not sure how long it will take startup founders to understand and it blows my mind how frequently people on HN seem to act like people "owe" a site something for the service they're providing. If I get an invite to your free photosharing site with features X, Y and Z, you're creating an expectation. If you change your offering once you get a ton of users in the hopes of monetizing them, you're changing the offering and these people leaving is justified. The reason they got there in the first place was because of your offering, which you're now changing.
