Aaron "Reddit" Swartz recounted an experience I found both amusing and thought-provoking:
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?"
At first, you might take this as an indictment of the value we place on the services created by business in general. It's a discontent we can aim as easily at YouTube as we can at Reddit; $1.6BB for a site where people share inane videos (with none of that money going to the videos authors, directors, or actors)?
Upon a little reflection, though, it struck me that the "nothing" the author saw is the key to the value of a service like Reddit. It's supposed to help me sort and sift through an unmanageable pile of information. To do it right, Reddit has to do it simply. So simply, that it's almost invisible to me. It approaches (but never reaches) nothing.
The internet has never had a problem with content scarcity. If anything, the problem is overabundance. We've got too much something. There's real merit in helping people find what they need without adding to the problem. Perhaps that's the "nothing" Aaron's author saw.
Tags: Reddit, Aaron Swartz, nothing, simplicity, overabundance