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Comment by 40four | Hacker News Reader

This quality of this article is terrible. It's very short (235 words), there are no concrete sources, or solid evidence that this is real. This is nothing more than speculation. Is this considered journalism is 2020?

Even more sad, is when you search and try to find better sources, and realize that it's mostly just a few small, outlier publications, copy and pasting off of each other. Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...).

So the way I see this, there is no story here. This is not real news. This is a rumor. Maybe even fake news. Nothing more, so let's stop talking about it.

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This article is a textbook example of "news stacking" from the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday [1]. Step 1, post some outlandish stories to random blog posts. These blog posts are usually niche, and are run by some "experts" with a core audience. They are trusted to be right.

Then that gets picked up by intermediary news sites like this *.co.uk domain. Then it gets floated to social media, where it gets popular and noticed by the big guns (NYT, Business Insider, Tech Crunch, etc) and then they just post the same stuff. Then suddenly what was once a rumor becomes true.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying

NYT, Businesses Insoder, Tech Crunch, etc. can simply all report that there is a rumor, and if they just do that often enough, society will treat it like a fact.

>Business Insider unabashedly copy and pasted from Charged Retail, and didn't even bother to format/ edit/ paraphrase anything. Even text from the link to sign up for the Charged Retail news letter is in there (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/lidl-owner-l...).

it's not copy pasting. BI is also a publishing platform.

Same reason why you see Bloomberg articles in full being posting on Yahoo Finance.

"The medium is the message" so they say. This is what the Internet has become.

The commentary is what makes this interesting, not the content of the article.

Hey, I like comments and commentary as much as the next person. But when I waste 10 minutes of my morning perusing threads, I really hope they are about something real :)

To be fair, you're probably right. The commentary is the most interesting part, even if the content is just a rumor, or hypothetical or whatever. There is still some value to be had from the threads. I saw a lot of experiences or personal info shared here about Schwarz Group, so some of that was interesting.

You're probably right, but the thread turned out to be unexpectedly interesting.

Fair point. I'll reconsider where I said 'stop talking about it'. Even bad stories can spawn good conversation! Some interesting inside experiences/ opinions about Schwarz Group were shared. Sometimes I need to keep my angry morning rant to myself! I'll try to keep this in mind in the future.

> This quality of this article is terrible. It's very short (235 words), there are no concrete sources, or solid evidence that this is real. This is nothing more than speculation. Is this considered journalism is 2020?

Yes.

No, this site is really fringe, I think nobody here was on this site before. I expect higher levels of quality from reputable news sources.

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