It was a microblogging platform; it had a chance to become a worthy competitor to tumblr from Europe but sadly, instead of gaining funding, it got spambots. Over the last 10 years a devoted community managed to grow around the site - it's hard to say how large in numbers but now it seems it wasn't enough to keep service running.
Spammers really do ruin everything. The guy who acquired delicious says as soon as he turned it back on after several years of read-only mode it immediately started getting hammered by spambots again. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1281285876388106247
There were periods on soup when main activity stream named here everyone was filled with nothing but some spambot posts; most likely these were green-lighted by staff itself up until few last months when they tried to introduce premium accounts, while basic ones were supposed to come with ads (disguised as native posts) and tracking. Majority of users were angered when a big banners shaming them for using adblocking and tracking extensions were introduced.
Site was always pretty much left alone beside serious issues like hardware failure that wiped most of the content from 2016; my problem with being unable to load and post within a particular group was never resolved (I was a member and confirmed to never being on blacklist; obviously the group always loaded within private mode without issues).
The simplicity of account registration, the possibility of creating sub-profiles within main one (similar to tumblr) were probably the sources of spambot thriving on soup. While we had post report and flagging features, only ignoring was the best way of getting rid of all that trash.
Spambots just post pages full of plagiarised content peppered with links, a hangover from SEO days when the belief was that a Google paid attention to word count of pages linking to your content.
