Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
Mr. Rathschmidt added that some apps are more efficient and require significantly fewer A.P.I. calls and that “Apollo is notably less efficient than other third-party apps.”
“The vast majority of A.P.I. users will not have to pay for access; not all third-party apps usage requires paid access,” he wrote, adding that access is “is free for moderator tools and bots.”
That is some shoddy reporting there. Selig is cited earlier in the piece, so to let that quote stand unchallenged either means an editor didn’t see it or … well, I’d rather not get more confirmation from the Times on that front.
I’ve noticed this a lot about mainstream reporting - seems to give more voice to corporates than anyone else.
I’ve read a number of articles on the protest over the past few days and not a single of them really explained all the issues well.
I can chalk a lot of that up to the presumed reader knowledge in the Times style guide simplifying things tremendously. I mean, who knows if anyone uses those anymore …
It’s just really glaring to have a quote with a claim that’s not easy to immediately verify as a reporter (1/xth the efficiency, per [source 1] / [source 2]) with the creator of the app quoted earlier but not used here. I would be livid if that made it to the desk.
- Journalists are often outsiders to these disputes and a full nuanced description of the situation requires more time than it takes to be the first reporter with the scoop in a world where news outlets pay more for news to be newest than news to be most accurate
- News outlets are big corporations and will often be favorable to corporations
- Corporations usually give very simple canned statements that are very east to parse and publish while dispersed groups such as unions, protestors, and online forum members have much less centralized narrative and can have a litany of different reasons for sharing a similar stance
Corporate journalism has its own special place in hell for me. After all the creativity was removed from rather central editing functions, I set about automating what was left at a hub and got shown the door when the efficiencies started to threaten justifying salaried positions.
They’re still going on about efficiency, meanwhile Apollo only used 0.4% of the requested daily limit Reddit required of 3rd party apps.
They set the limit, and are now acting like their hands were forced by an app hitting 1/250th of that limit.
The Apollo developer said something like, and I’m heavily paraphrasing, Reddit recommended to use less than 10000 api calls per user per day and he was at like 300.
So he was fat before the recommendation so why further optimize it. He said if Reddit worked with him, he would have been happy to do optimizations, but s as months notice does not really give him time.
