The author brings up some valid questions (such as highlighting the de-emphasis on social networks and the supposedly low numbers of network owners relative to the company's earlier claims) but it's ridiculous to suggest that Ning is a "pyramid scam". It's poorly sourced and poorly argued accusations like this that undermine the credibility of the entire post.

Also they used to have a REST api to access the data that was stored in their "Ning Content Store". I'm not sure when they disabled access to that but before they did it was barely usable anyway. It was full of undocumented bugs that would cause your operations to fail.

If I remember correctly, pretty much any story with "pyramid scheme" or "ponzi scheme" in the title got massive amount of linkage.

I have to say if that was a planned scam, it is quite funny to plan on "let's find millions of members". If you can find millions of members, you don't need to scam.

Can you really trust your platform(cloud) provider? Is your data save? Will you ever be able to get it back?

The link is not working for me, perhaps the first incidence I've seen of a site being "Hacker Newsed" ..