After Reddit became popular, Aaron says, people came up to him and said how much they enjoyed using it, but also talked about how it had destroyed their productivity and consumed their lives. Many people have said the same about YouTube or MySpace or Facebook — and how they spend all their time updating their profile or checking their friend requests or scanning for pictures — and Twitter.com is the latest addition to the family of time-wasting, attention-destroying applications, Aaron suggests. He quotes Cory Doctorow as saying: “It’s like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate.” Aaron argues that Reddit and Twitter and other tools are the equivalent of chocolate bars.

Peter Caputa at pc4media makes an even stronger argument, saying the tech blogosphere is “just a bunch of surface skimming idiots in a bar w/ no alcohol, and that it’s “mostly Michael Arrington’s fault.” At some point, he says, companies have to “gaze beyond your own navel and come up with a business model; an application that connects people in meaningful ways to accomplish goals beyond instant self-gratification.”

I think Aaron and Peter are both right, in a sense. It’s easy to get consumed by things like Twitter or Facebook or even instant messaging for that matter, and they are a little like junk food — fast, sugar high, illusion of being full, etc. And yet, I can’t agree completely. Why? As a commenter notes on Aaron’s blog, a lot of novels are crap too, and probably just as bad for you (don’t get me started on television). Is reading a blog any worse than reading a potboiler detective novel? I don’t know, but it’s a pretty close race.

In the end, I think a lot of the things we’re seeing are experiments, and no one really knows whether they will actually be useful or not, or what they really *mean* in the larger sense. I do know that things like Twitter and Facebook and MySpace connect people in ways that novels do not — I’m not saying that’s necessarily better. Just saying.

Comments

Tag:

If you’re Aaron Swartz – whose social-bookmarking site Reddit just got bought by Conde Nast – you would write a blog post complaining about the soulless, grey office with the crapped-up corporate laptops and the traffic noise.

Aaron’s post is quite the litany of grief, from the white noise and the unhelpful IT department to the inability to get anything done. As I was reading it, I found myself ping-ponging back and forth – from sympathizing with someone who is clearly a creative and frustrated individual who is now part of a large, corporate machine, to wanting to shake him by the throat and shout: “Dude, your company got bought and you live in San Francisco, for chrissake! Grow up!”

At one point, he complains that to escape from his soul-crushing day he has to go bike-riding and stay out until 3 partying. Yeah, I’m all choked up. It’s interesting to read the comments on Aaron’s post (which has no doubt pleased his new corporate masters to no end). Some are definitely sympathetic, and advise him to get headphones, work at home and so on – or quit and start another company. Others are of the “grow up” variety.

One guy says his post sounds like a letter home from camp, in which the camper complains about everything from his bunkmates to the food. But my favourite comment appears to be from Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, who says simply “Speak for yourself, man.”

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Mathew Ingram is a
technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national
newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at
www.mathewingram.com/work and www.mathewingram.com/media.