Ack sorry, my bad. It wasn't meant to be, but I see I have misintentionally done just that.
What I meant to communnicate was "we shouldn't take these stats at face value and therefore assume the scandals have had no impact" but I made the mistake of phrasing it as if it were an assertion (not an interpretation I'm used to), being too pithy, and also using Zuckerberg's name rather than "social media"/"facebook".
I didn't mean it to be a tangent, just a genuine point that such statistics should be treated with healthy scepticism and therefore caution against concluding too much from them. Hopefully the last bit in the post at least indicates I was sincere. But totally my bad. Need to take more care.
I'm certainly often a contrarian, but never intentionally a troll.
Thanks. Moderating HN has taught me that most of what looks like trolling is unintentional.
Most of us consider our comments to be individual statements; we don't think of them as roots of the next possible subthread. But that's actually what matters for discussion quality.
It seemed to me that he 'claimed' (if you want to use that term) that "A or B". I'm not sure what "A" was exactly, but he pretty clearly didnt just assert "B". Although sure, he did cast aspersions (or something), but he's hardly alone in doing that about his target. It would be novel to hear someone claim Zuckerberg is truthful, or say anything nice about the guy. The word "claim" was the problem here, I think. He may have suggested the possibility that Zuckerberg was lying, but claim that he was?! By what definition? "It's day..or night" "You claimed it's night!"
In my opinion, it depends on GP's level of English language proficiency. If it is at least average, then he did make the claim.
AFAIK "... or B" is a common idiomatic expression used to convey, in a sarcastic tone, the fact that the speaker disagrees with A, and considers B to be true.
Sure, but saying (or sarcastically hinting) that you believe B (that you 'consider B to be true') is still a different thing from saying ('claiming') that actually B.
Thanks Mastazi, for pointing that out. I did make the mistake of intending what I wrote to be literal rather than implying something. My bad. But I see what you mean.
The claim was that there's another explanation, not that there's only that other explanation. Why did everyone get their feathers in a bunch over Facebook's integrity?
Actively lying about numbers in the prepared remarks of an earnings call...? Probably not (unless you think Facebook is actually a scam ten times bigger than Enron waiting to be exposed.)
After everything that FB has already lied about, the repeated examples of dark patterns, shady practices, the "dumb fucks" quote, is it really far-fetched to think that Zuckerberg would lie about this too, if he thought he could get away with it?
Who's going to prove him wrong? Does anyone else have access to FB internal metrics? And what's the downside to lying? Worst case a slap on the wrist fine and a drop in stock price?
Zuck has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be the type of person who will absolutely take advantage of any situation without any kind of ethical qualms.
I'm not saying he's lying about this too, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least, SEC or no.
You certainly can’t treat anything he says as ground truth - you need independent figures.