I've noticed this regarding companies I've worked at too. When it involves any knowledge that wouldn't be available to the public, people on HN spout plausible-sounding theories as though they're fact, but they actually have no basis in reality. "Turned out Company X was having trouble monetizing Feature Y so they've decided to pivot and adopt a new marketing strategy which is why customer support now takes so long to respond if you're not on an enterprise tier." And for other random companies that stuff sounds perfectly plausible, but every time I've been in a position to fact-check against deep personal knowledge of the company in question, it's been total BS. Just wild speculation presented with an air of authority.
Do you think it is just speculation presented as fact? Or do people really believe what they are saying?
Even within a company I am very sceptical of narrative. The root cause of something can be quite different to what is presented, which can be different to what people believe privately. We are all biased after all.
I don't think people are purposely trying to mislead, I think they're just connecting the dots with whatever low-quality sources are available to them: old Tech Crunch articles, press releases, company blog posts, remarks from coworkers/friends who've gotten sales outreach, etc. And making some kind of narrative out of them which feels believable. Often logical inferences to draw, but ultimately just wrong/irrelevant.
Every color science and/or accessibility thread trends towards quoting and reinforcing the same gentleman who has blotted out the sun by writing extremely long (and informative!) explanations of color theory on several sites, in service of an extremely flawed conclusion that is fixed by an hour of Mathematica and experience with actual color science.
