This isn’t a particularly great insight, I suppose: that you can goose demand if you shift costs into the future. Discount rates exist; it’s why economists fret about declines in consumer borrowing. It’s why people still smoke cigarettes.

I have an aesthetic aversion to it — a general sense that things would be better if costs were presented up front. That it would be preferable for Twitter to be a protocol like email rather than a service like Facebook. Maybe even that it would be more moral for them to be. That the costs associated with transitioning between social networks every, what, five years are high enough to be worth complaining about.*

But this is probably is just a meaningless prejudice on part. Twitter wouldn’t have become Twitter if those costs had been apparent from the start. To wish it could be otherwise is just to say that you want foolish angel investors to buy you toys for free**. The service will probably remain fine for a long time, and then it’ll get worse, and we’ll all bitch about it and eventually something else will come along.