Genuinely, without any snark intended: please presume I'm an idiot here because I fully acknowledge I may be missing something blatantly obvious & am just trying to understand your argument better.

> The other post

> the parent and aunt/uncle replies.

I've gone & re-read the parent / grand parent replies in this thread on the assumption I had missed something but I can't find any reference to estimating growth rates of online companies via publicly exposed db record timestamps.

Nor can I conceive of an obvious system in my head by which one would do so. I acknowledge that such a hypothetical system almost certainly exists, but it seems non-obvious (to me) & as such it's quite difficult to reason about & discuss.