Trace the claim. Tell the story.

1. Qualification

A subject must operate a real product, document building activity over time, and leave enough primary evidence to reconstruct a system. Audience size alone does not qualify anyone.

2. Source hierarchy

1. Primary: founder and company pages, original posts, product records, original interviews.
2. Contemporaneous: archived pages, launch records, community discussions near the event.
3. Corroboration: reputable reporting and databases. These cannot carry the central analysis alone.

3. Claim ledger

Before a word of the story is written, every material claim is recorded with its wording, type, source, date, access date, evidence excerpt, confidence, and review status. Numbers require a source, unit, period, and product context. That ledger stays in the research file for each edition and is the basis for corrections.

4. How it reads on the page

Editions are written as narrative features. Sources are named and dated in the prose itself: who said it, where, and when. Verification detail, methodology caveats, and everything we could not establish are consolidated in one Sources and evidence notes section at the end of each edition, including a single What we could not verify box. A claim the record does not support is cut, not hedged.

We link out sparingly, at most three outbound links per edition, reserved for the primary records that carry the story. Every other source is fully identified in text, and the complete reference record for any edition is available through our corrections process.

5. Adversarial review

Before publication, a separate review pass by someone who did not write the edition tries to disprove or narrow every important claim, re-opens the cited records, logs contradictions, and blocks unresolved material. Transcript-derived quotations are checked against the published captions, and recognition errors are noted rather than silently corrected.

6. Freshness

Live dashboards and counters are quoted with the date we read them, never as timeless facts. Material updates are logged, and corrections remain visible. Current pages are not assumed to prove their historical state.