[throwaway201606]

I do not think that there is any confusion or misreading of the numbers here.

Without dealing with the specific points made in the piece, I would argue that there is gap in understanding the premise of the piece.

The article starts with numbers but it is not a analysis of quantitative measures i.e. is it not a statistical analysis.

The article is an "outside-looking-in" qualitative argument with an attempt to support those quantitative arguments with quantitative values (this is called competitive intelligence in some circles).

In other words, it should be read as an "opinion piece" with some numbers in it: the numbers are not the point, the (subjective ) opinions are the point.

I get it that numbers can be used to make a point either way (i.e. the author could use "confusion about numbers" as way to make a point while there really isn't any confusion ) but the points I would take away from the argument about numbers are:

- the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:

    i) the org has put out in the past 
    and 
    ii) other similar businesses have used and continue to use

- the number are definitely designed to be impenetrable no matter how you approach them

To quote the author:

"When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign."

[jsnell]

But why should we give any credence to these opinions? Certainly not because the author is an expert on the subject, their background appears to in PR. Nor because the author is showing any kind of understanding of the subject; actually the opposite, given the multiple basic mistakes made in the opening to this piece. Like, it's not even that he got the facts and reasoning wrong. It's that he has so little understanding of the space he didn't realize that there had to be an error somewhere.

And it's not like the rest of the piece isn't full of links to purported facts. The author clearly can't be trusted on presenting the facts correctly nor interpreting their interpretations correctly, so you'd kind of need to fact check all of it. That's a lot of effort just to properly evaluate this tripe.

The only reason to pay attention to this is that they're writing something you want to believe, in a style you find appealing, and don't really care whether any of it is true or not.

> - the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:

But that fundamental premise is wrong. Meta has released comparable numbers in the past, which is exactly GP's point. And releasing aggregate user numbers across multiple products rather than per product is a totally standard practice.

[dsizzle]

Here's the specific link that OP cites and quotes from: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... You don't think the author misread this in the referenced paragraph?