It makes no sense. You can pull the plug on the site without winding down traffic in a really pointless slow bleed-out of the user base.
It’s just kind of cruel and nonsensical. There is no technical reason for it.
“Here’s the content for 5 minutes every hour, maybe. Oh, now it’s gone for good. Sucks. Bye.”
This is -not- the way to end a site with such a long history. It’s rather pathetic, really.