Thank you. It's difficult to call Zitron right or wrong because he is merely grabbing the attention and clicks of AI sceptics and people afraid of any change. Patrick Boyle is another example with his constant stream of everything is broken videos, from AI to EVs.
I am not all in on AI, but the discussion requires nuance. Zitron does not have it because he is interested in attention and not discussion. The article deconstructs his antics really well. So again thank you. I really appreciated this part
> To make the case that these things are dying, he pulls on minor issues that are not positioned to cause the very large changes he suggests are about to occur. For Meta, he cited some kind of alleged MAU drop for Facebook. Rather than use Meta's own MAU figures or any kind of revenue or profit numbers, he seems to have used numbers from Similarweb. My experience with 3rd party tracking numbers like this is that they're quite inaccurate and generally useless for anything other than a rough order of magnitude comparison, making the Zitron's cited decline meaningless. FB stopped reporting MAU publicly in December 2023, but most estimates have FB MAU increasing over time and the numbers Meta does report show generally increasing usage over time for their products; Zitron cherry-picked an outlier low estimate to make his point.
I am not all in on AI, but the discussion requires nuance. Zitron does not have it because he is interested in attention and not discussion. The article deconstructs his antics really well. So again thank you. I really appreciated this part
> To make the case that these things are dying, he pulls on minor issues that are not positioned to cause the very large changes he suggests are about to occur. For Meta, he cited some kind of alleged MAU drop for Facebook. Rather than use Meta's own MAU figures or any kind of revenue or profit numbers, he seems to have used numbers from Similarweb. My experience with 3rd party tracking numbers like this is that they're quite inaccurate and generally useless for anything other than a rough order of magnitude comparison, making the Zitron's cited decline meaningless. FB stopped reporting MAU publicly in December 2023, but most estimates have FB MAU increasing over time and the numbers Meta does report show generally increasing usage over time for their products; Zitron cherry-picked an outlier low estimate to make his point.
Yes he is a classic cherry picker.