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Comment by herodoturtle | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was referring to the HN title of this post:

"Twitter to lay off 25% of workforce in first round of job cuts"

I opened the article thinking this was a formal announcement. But it's nothing of the sort. It's just speculation at this stage.

Hope that clears things up.

View on HN

But it's not speculation:

> ...according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved.

This comes from the news stations who said days ago that people were already laid off, and their sources turned out to be random people they found on the street with meme fake names. https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/10/28/2339204/pranksters-...

No, it doesn't, this comes from the Washington Post, speaking to people familiar with the layoff planning.

Given everything over the last decade, people should not trust anything when it involves a) highly controversial/partisan/breathless news and b) dealing in anonymous sources and rumors.

I think we can rely on peoples' own smarts to build in that skepticism. There's not a lot of benefit to qualifying every piece of information to say that it might be wrong.

It comes down to, do you trust that WaPo properly vetted the sources, and do you believe that the sources, whether they were in a position to be credible or not, were acting on solid information?

E.g. according to Business Insider Facebook should have fired half the company, according to “sources”, but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge yet

I am sorry but i am over the "people familiar" .. " condition of anonymity" crap in news

Either put a name to it, or dont report on it

Asking sources to publish their name is a very sure way to not have sources at all.

Quote Orwell, Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. You need to get people to tell you about all those things, and as that someone who dislike them being printed has power (it ain't news otherwise,) you need to find a way to make people talk to you. "Help me to rekt your career and life" just don't cut it.

That would make sense if journalists had a better track record when it came to their anonymous sources, but they don't.

I understand that, and maybe the activists pretending to be journalists should have thought about that before burning the public's trust by just taking any sensationalized "source" with no vetting and reporting on it as fact.

The "media" did this to themselves, now at this point no one would trust any news story that is only validated with "anonymous sources" as the media has proven they are either incapable of vetting these sources for truthful info, or do not actually have any sources at all and are just making shit up for the clicks

Either way they have given the public no reason to trust them at this point

It's amazing how people still trust these "according to people familiar with x" articles after the past 5+ years. Like 99% of them have been wrong and just used to push a political agenda.

Are two of them named Ligma and Johnson?

We've changed the title to what the article says now. I don't know whether WaPo changed their own title or the submitted title was editorializing (the latter is against the HN guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Thank you ^_^

“Twitter plans to lay off…” would probably be a more precise headline, yes. It’s more than speculation, though, but you do have to trust the reporters on that.

"It's believed that Twitter plans to lay off..."

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