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Posterous took investment not only from venture capital, but also from users who believed and trusted that the service would find a way to make money and stick around. It hasn't repaid that investment. This feels like a turning point to me as I have no incentive to start investing as a user with the next hot startup that comes along.

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You were deluding yourself that you ever had that incentive to "invest" your time with free-to-use startups. Or, more likely, you used the service because it was awesome at the time, better than the alternatives, and didn't think about the downside risk.

There are people out there trying to compete with free and building slow, deliberate, organic growth on the model. So it's hard for me to feel sorry for the users who feel burned when "free" doesn't work out.

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