I'm not sure eecks is really being entitled, I read it more as (s)he's referring to the often heard remark (here) about any kind of thing that shuts down that is free: "You should have paid for it, use service xyz that is paid and they won't shut down". It is more prevalent in the online business of course, but happens in offline as well.
Whether you pay for something or not does not guarantee that it will not shut down, it will simply change the odds that it will. Imagine if LCS would have made hacker news monthly a free publication, he'd have had to shut it down long ago. So in that sense paying for the service made it possible to last this long in the first place but that does not entitle you to expect the service to last for ever.
It gets thrown around a lot but then the context is an entirely different one. A publication is not to be compared with an online service that stores your data or that you come to depend on in any way. Especially not this one.
So it makes zero sense to make that reference. You could say the same after you've eaten in a restaurant for 3 years, paid for your meals and then the restaurant goes out of business for whatever reason. You still got what you paid for and you're not entitled to a perpetual continuation of that opportunity to eat at that particular restaurant.
As opposed to say using a paid email account, getting it embedded in your workflow, spreading the address to all your contacts and then one day the company decides mail is no longer important to them and shuts it down. In such cases you could reasonably say that you expected the service to continue because you paid for it and make some connection (you'd still be wrong, but that's another point).
The tone is off but I think there is something to the point eecks makes.
Remember that famous 'idlewords article[0]? I recall it making some circles around HN and the widely held conclusion was that free successful services are likely to disappear at a moment's notice, while paid successful services are unlikely to do so. Of course it is not true - the reason why is obvious when you've lived in the same apartment for more than few years and noticed how often shops - small and big - open up, and then close down. No service is forever. Rare are those who last more than few years.
But even if it's wrong, this argument about paid stuff having significantly longer lifespan was widely repeated, and was believed by many.
Who says that it being paid did not cause it to have a significantly longer lifespan? I can't even imagine a magazine like this being put out for free.
