The causal incrementality of ad spend is rarely negative. You expect to see decreasing returns with additional ad spend. For each dollar in ad spend, one advertiser might want to see $3 in revenue, another $5. Incrementality studies then allow advertisers to tune spend to their operating points.
Facebook does like money. Do you think lying to the biggest advertisers in the world is the best long-term strategy, or do you think instead it might be better to report out the most accurate results possible?
Facebook has a history of screwing advertisers ("want your page to show up in people's feeds? Get more follows, here's how to buy ads targeting that", then one year later "we've decided to downgrade pages in people's feeds"...), bankers (their IPO pricing), and essentially everyone they have a business relationship with. I'd expect them to stretch the truth as far as they can get away with.
Yes, that's what the article says. The research paper says:
"Several dozen optical echelle spectra demonstrate that HR 6819 is a hierarchical triple. A classical Be star is in a wide orbit with an unconstrained period around an inner 40 d binary consisting of a B3 III star and an unseen companion in a circular orbit. The radial-velocity semi-amplitude of 61.3 km/s of the inner star and its minimum (probable) mass of 5.0 M (6.3 ± 0.7 M ) imply a mass of the unseen object of ≥ 4.2 M (≥ 5.0 ± 0.4 M ), that is, a black hole (BH)."
"This was a product decision. Currently view counts are purely cosmetic, but we did not want to rule out the possibility of them being used in ranking in the future. As such, building in some degree of abuse protection made sense (e.g. someone can't just sit on a page refreshing to make the view number go up). I am fully expecting us to tweak this time window (and the duplication heuristics in general) in future, especially as the way that users interact with content will change as Reddit evolves."
Because it's more valuable of a data point to those who care about overall audience and reach. Someone visiting repeatedly might be evidence of an engaged user, but things like ads would have diminishing returns.
