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I found it a little unfortunate that one of the threads was so dismissive of NYT [1] due to a SCMP article [2]. I checked archive.org's original snapshot of NYT

I found it a little unfortunate that one of the threads was so dismissive of NYT [1] due to a SCMP article [2]. I checked archive.org's original snapshot of NYT article [3] and Newsdiff [4] to try to make sure that NYT didn't edit the original article in response, and sure enough they were all worded "planned to step down" and "Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba's board of directors and continue to mentor the company's management", which is accurate. I suppose the lesson I'm taking away is to not buy into a counter-reaction immediately. It's obvious in hindsight: SCMP is owned by Alibaba after all. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17940919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17940919 [2] https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2163376/jack-ma-remain-alibabas-chairman-succession-plan-younger-talent https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2163376/jack... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20180907230109/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba-jack-ma-retiring.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180907230109/https://www.nytim... (may need to turn off JS) [4] http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/https%3A/www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba-jack-ma-retiring.html http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/https%3A/www.nytimes.co...

noname120 7y ago
Thank you for your documented insight. In spite of our best intentions, we—as a community—often do judgement mistakes. One thing that I've been meaning to do is to write postmortems about our reaction to some events, and their eventual outcome. This would help us improve the way that we digest information. One particularly interesting subject to cover would be Bloomberg's alleged “Big Hack”[1]. Between the initial publication and the final denial by all the involved companies, a lot of different narratives have emerged and gained traction here—and most of them turned out to be incorrect. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328
yorwba 7y ago
> I suppose the lesson I'm taking away is to not buy into a counter-reaction immediately. It's obvious in hindsight: SCMP is owned by Alibaba after all. Let's not be so dismissive of SCMP either. They're accurately reporting what an Alibaba spokesman said about Ma. The objection doesn't seem to be about the parts where the NYT says that he "planned to step down" and "Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba's board of directors and continue to mentor the company's management", which is accurate, but the other parts where they call it "retirement." Evidently he thinks that his plans for the future should still be considered active involvement with the company.

noname120 7y ago

Thank you for your documented insight. In spite of our best intentions, we—as a community—often do judgement mistakes. One thing that I've been meaning to do is to write postmortems about our reaction to some events, and their eventual outcome. This would help us improve the way that we digest information. One particularly interesting subject to cover would be Bloomberg's alleged “Big Hack”[1]. Between the initial publication and the final denial by all the involved companies, a lot of different narratives have emerged and gained traction here—and most of them turned out to be incorrect. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328

yorwba 7y ago

> I suppose the lesson I'm taking away is to not buy into a counter-reaction immediately. It's obvious in hindsight: SCMP is owned by Alibaba after all. Let's not be so dismissive of SCMP either. They're accurately reporting what an Alibaba spokesman said about Ma. The objection doesn't seem to be about the parts where the NYT says that he "planned to step down" and "Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba's board of directors and continue to mentor the company's management", which is accurate, but the other parts where they call it "retirement." Evidently he thinks that his plans for the future should still be considered active involvement with the company.