alt Hacker News> Visually, this is vastly exaggerating the variation. Actual usage did not even double.
No, it is literally showing the exact variation of interest. If you think it's exaggerating the variation, you are not reading the chart. You are glancing at the chart, ignoring what it actually says in multiple ways, and imagining it has a baseline of zero, when it clearly does not.
Read the chart. What does it actually say?
> If you think it's exaggerating the variation, you are not reading the chart.
That's true of every instance where a chart is criticized for playing around with the axes scale. Imagine the stock price of a company varied between 50.1 and 50.2 over a week. And I presented it as a chart with the min being 50.09 and max being 50.21, and drew all the variation over a large vertical space. And then tried to imply that the stock was volatile. What would be the problem?
Let me ask you this. What is the point of this chart (or any similar chart)? Simply presenting a table with all the values would have conveyed all the information - wouldn't you agree?