Hong Kong entrepreneurs are always careful with their words, which contrasts sharply with their mainland counterparts, who come out with shocking remarks from time to time.
This is particularly true for the new economy bunch, like Alibaba's Jack Ma Yun and Meituan's Wang Xing.
They were joined early this month by Tencent vice president Sun Zhonghuai, who advanced the "pig feed theory" when making observations on the ecology of the industry.
According to Sun, some of the content that short-video platforms incessantly push on their users has no nutritional value, like pig feed.
Once the users click on "pig feed" items, this kind of content is all they will get in future because the algorithm thinks it's what they like, he said.
Though the remark did not trigger a political backlash, it did unleash fresh rounds of verbal fencing in the trade.
It also reopened an old feud with short-video provider ByteDance, with which Tencent has been locked in cut-throat competition for years.
As Tencent casts doubts on the intellectual property rights of many of ByteDance's short videos, ByteDance suggests that Tencent is abusing its market leader position to perpetrate a monopoly.
Both are extremely serious accusations. At a time when the central government is highly vigilant over the internet business ecology, such tit-for-tat is getting more and more hair-raising to watch.
Social media's personalized content distribution - using algorithms to direct content to users based on their preference - has been criticized for skewing information delivery and leading users by the hand to see only what they want to read or watch.
Another objection against such overly aggressive content force-feeding is that it restricts the freedom to choose information.
So Sun made a valid point and hit a competitor's sore spot. It's just that the message is brutally blunt, so it raised some eyebrows.
Siu Sai-wo is publisher of Sing Tao Daily
