Blog

Reddit es mi servicio social de noticias preferido. Todos los demás que he probado lo he acabado dejando. Básicamente, porque los encontraba muy aburridos. Francamente, hay un límite a las noticias que puedo tragar al día sobre informática, cacharritos o cualquier otro tema friki/geek.

Pero aunque Reddit contiene noticias de ésas, siempre me pareció bastante más amplio. Incluso así, a los usuarios de Reddit parecen interesarle poco los cacharros y más el uso de los mismos. También encuentro muchos enlaces sobre política, sociedad, incluso filosofía y cosas raras. Vamos, que se ha convertido en mi proveedor principal de cosas interesantes o divertidas para leer.

Ahora una empresa importante lo ha comprado. Me alegro por sus dueños -cuatro personas que lo hacían todo- y espero que el servicio siga siendo igual.

Aaron Swartz -uno de los responsables- ha escrito un curioso y muy interesante comentario sobre la venta, que reflexiona sobre el papel de Reddit y se sale del «estoy muy contento». Viene a decir, que sitios como Reddit tampoco son tan importantes. Voy a citar extensamente:

But whenever I stepped outside the bubble, things were very different. At non-tech parties, I’d have trouble explaining what it was I did. («So you, uh, have a web site?») Once I went far outside the city to have lunch with an author I respected. He asked about what I did, wanted me to explain it in great detail. He asked how many visitors we had. I told him and he sputtered. «I’ve spent fifteen years building an audience, and you’re telling me in a year you have a million visitors?» I assented.

Puzzled, he insisted I show him the site on his own computer, but he found it was just a simple as I described. (Simpler, even.) «So it’s just a list of links?» he said. «And you don’t even write them yourselves?» I nodded. «But there’s nothing to it!» he insisted. «Why is it so popular?»

Inside the bubble, nobody asks this inconvenient question. We just mumble things like «democratic news» or «social bookmarking» and everybody just assumes it all makes sense. But looking at this guy, I realized I had no actual justification. It was just a list of links. And we didn’t even write them ourselves.

But that’s not something you can say on TechCrunch. You can say a site is cool, stupid, popular, a flop, innovative, or clichéd. But the one thing you can’t say, the one thing that everybody skips over, is that these sites aren’t anything serious. And so when Michael Arrington told us that these stories of acquisition were his favorite part of the «entrepreneurial spirit», I couldn’t help but think that somebody was missing the point.