Reddit Acquired: A Personal View
Here’s a neat little trick of the interweb. I get a link to my Reddit post from a blog I’ve never heard of before (Raw Thought by Aaron Swartz), and it turns out Swartz is a Reddit employee (well, technically now Conde Nast employee). He has a personal post about his experience just after the acquisition.
Most amusing is his attempt to explain Reddit to a non-technical author:
Quote:
“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.
Endquote.
What makes a site popular is the “secret sauce” that is the worth behind Reddit, and it’s funny and refreshing to see that it’s a relative mystery even to one of the four that works there. I appreciate his honesty.
Second, here’s another post on the Raw Thought Blog with a list of “Reddit Acquired” links that may prove interesting reading. The reactions range from congrats, to “is this a bubble 2.0?” to what BS, to what Conde Nast might do.
Another thing I noticed about the Raw Thought blog (and Reddit itself) is the design is very sparse. I’m thinking I’m on the right track with my WordPress improvements list but may need to go further. Chop, chop, chop, chop.
It’s much easier to do sparse well than it is to do complex well.
Right on Aaron… I’m still adjusting some things on this blog.
And I’m sure you saw this article, but people are learning (again) that sparse = faster load times = more happy visitors to your site.
It is not so complicate as people thing and really it very easy.