> If Snap had gone up, nobody would have cared about the doctored metrics.

This is essentially the game that most VC-backed startups have to play as far as I can tell. Everybody hopes to achieve breakout market dominance before anybody starts to ask questions about what's really true.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In recent years we (i.e. investors) have found out before IPO, but Snap is perhaps a reminder of some of the downsides of the old dot-com bubble.