[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.