I think the idea of Flock (and all modern software, pretty much) is not just to offer a service, but to offer it as dirt-cheap and lazily as possible with the intent of creating reasonable margins for a product that otherwise shouldn't even be profitable in the first place.

Doing things, "correctly" is sort of no longer the place of software. The idea is to build solutions that are comprised of toothpicks and sticky tacky so you can force out whatever the alternative was and make money for the shareholders at the same time.