WTF, Dropbox?

With only one exception I can think of (their decision to appoint Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors), I've been a huge fan of Dropbox over the years. Great service for syncing files, backing up files, sharing files ...

... well, strike that last. I just got an email from Dropbox:

We'll soon be ending support for the Public folder. Dropbox Basic users will be able to use the Public folder until March 15, 2017. After that date the files in your Public folder will become private, and links to these files will be deactivated.

The only two descriptors I can think of for this are "dumb" and "evil."

Dropbox isn't just planning to make itself less useful in the future (dumb), it's planning to intentionally strike dead God only knows how many millions of links that users, including me, have used to share files with readers for years (evil).

This isn't "hey, sorry, we're going out of business" or something along those lines. That would be understandable.

No, it's "hey, sorry, you trusted us and we're screwing you."

So now I get to pencil in time over the next three months to track down all the links that I trusted Dropbox to preserve and find some other way to deliver the linked content. How did Santa know that was exactly what I wanted for Christmas?