User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: April 4, 2016/@comment-1280533-20160405132033/@comment-452-20160410050204

I strongly suspect that the reason behind the deprecation of many features is because they cannot monetise them.

With maps, there has always been unused ad divs, and when I questioned what they were for, they brushed me off.

I suspect that the internal discussions they had were regarding "where to put the ads", and the reason they won't be more transparent is they don't want the majority of us to realise just how much they're focused on "monetising" our content.

Frankly, I'm surprised Maps was ever created at all, as it seems like a waste of their time, considering the lack of ads.