Review by New York Times Review
FIVE YEARS AGO, it seemed like a swell idea for Mark Zuckerberg to connect every human being on the planet, because we would all sit around singing "Kumbaya" and ordering from Amazon. Journalists revered Twitter for giving a megaphone to oppressed groups like, well, journalists. Google, figuring it had solved the problems of the living, launched a venture to defeat death. Even then, at a moment of techno-optimism we are unlikely to see again in our lifetimes, Reddit was a toxic swamp. It was the place you went, shrouded in anonymity, for pornography, hard-core racism, revenge porn, Nazi cheerleading, Jew-baiting, creepshots, fat-shaming, mindless anarchy and pictures of dead kids or of women who had been beaten. If anyone bothered to look, Reddit was proof that on the internet, the trolls were in charge. Founded in 2005, soon after Facebook, Reddit has always been something of an anomaly among companies whose content was generated by users. Its founders, barely out of their teens, had no real vision. It wasn't even their idea. They cashed out as soon as they could. The buyer was Condé Nast, home of America's toniest magazines, but executives there had no vision either. Reddit was created by millions of Americans with a taste for darkness. You can't blame this one on Vladimir Putin. In the beginning, Reddit users simply shared links about interesting things they read. Then comments were added. The job of moderating was assigned to anonymous volunteers, who created and shaped "subreddits" to their own passions. This was a genius move: It allowed Reddit not only to keep its staff lean, but to distance the company from the sleazier content. Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, a writer for Inc. magazine, tells the Reddit story in "We Are the Nerds." The two co-founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, cooperated extensively. I admire them for doing so because despite Lagorio-Chaikin's best efforts - Ohanian is called "charismatic" or celebrated for his "charisma" on Pages 47, 158, 214, 223 and 330 - they come off as whiny and callow schemers, and not the sharpest of sticks. On the very first page, the two University of Virginia seniors cannot figure out what a "kiosk" is. The title "We Are the Nerds" doesn't really fit the tale. "We Are the Trolls" would have made much more sense. "I was always kind of an [expletive]," Huffman explains early on. Lagorio-Chafkin bluntly calls him "a total troll." He was also a genius programmer. The great achievement of the social internet was to unleash jerkdom for many while monetizing it for a few. The Reddit tale is an indictment of Silicon Valley, something Lagorio-Chafkin seems to sense but never confronts headon, perhaps because she is so grateful for access to Huffman and Ohanian. "Two nice guys who made it, by crafting something incredible and yet ridiculously unwieldy, with no lack of turbulence along the way," Lagorio-Chafkin writes in an author's note. A more accurate summation might be: "Two inexperienced young guys created something they didn't understand and couldn't control." It's all here anyway: the lack of adult oversight; the suck-up press; the growthat-any-cost mentality; the loyal employees, by turns abused and abusive (memo from management: "You do realize you were talking about penises for 90 minutes, right?"); the defense of horrendous behavior as "free speech"; the jettisoning of "free speech" when it served corporate purposes; the way no one seeks permission but all expect forgiveness. "We Are the Nerds" is most compelling when it tells the story of a third young man who played a founding role at Reddit. Aaron Swartz was brilliant, troubled and impossible, but he saw the tech economy more clearly than well-medicated people. "In the old days the new money was made through theft and abuse of office," he wrote. "Now any random computer programmer - or even the people who hung around them - could find themselves saddled with a pile of cash." In early 2013, hounded by the government over a stupid stunt involving the downloading of academic journals, Swartz committed suicide. Reddit became so offensive it was difficult to work there. A community manager who had a brief tenure in 2015 told Lagori°Chafkin some of the reasons: "Child molesters, child porn, vicious stalking, rape threats, serious harassment, people taking the harassment offline and people filing police reports on each other." One chief executive, stressed beyond endurance, simply stopped showing up for work. His replacement, Ellen Pao, tried to impose order in the office and on the site. The backlash led to her abrupt departure. Huffman returned and purged most of the staff. The charismatic Ohanian came back as well, trying a few Reddit spinoffs that fizzled. He is best known now for being Mr. Serena Williams. I wondered if any of his new relatives ever asked him about the popular subreddit called CoonTown - you can guess the contents - but "We Are the Nerds" is silent on this. CoonTown was finally banned by Reddit in 2015. While writing this review, I poked around Reddit. I saw some naked women, read some unusual opinions ("Just ignoring all the horrific atrocities caused by the Nazis, the Nazi flag actually looks pretty decent"), had a few laughs at youthful sexual confessions. It was pretty benign. Maybe the site is no longer so toxic, or maybe the toxic internet has made me numb. I also saw a lot of ads. Reddit is worth about $2 billion, which means Advance Publications, the parent of Condé Nast and now Reddit's biggest investor, made good money. In Silicon Valley, that's still pretty much all that matters. DAVID Streitfeld covers Silicon Valley for The Times. He is the editor of an updated edition of "David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
How did Reddit, a social news and discussion website known for stunts, nerdy in-jokes, massive acts of charity, and the web's darkest and most perverse content get to be the sixth most trafficked website in the world? Lagorio-Chafkin, a writer for Inc. magazine, covers the whole story in this meticulous and even-handed examination of one of Silicon Valley's most controversial and consequential successes. Founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005 through the Harvard startup incubator Y Combinator, the site had a meteoric rise and was sold just over a year later to Condé Nast for $10 million. The author chronicles the company's public and behind-the-scenes struggles to rein in the site's unruly community, whose anything goes ethos begat popular features like Ask Me Anything but also rampant misogyny, racism, and malicious trolling all of which peaked during the 2016 presidential campaign. Capturing Reddit at its best (like its philanthropic offshoot Reddit Gifts) and worst (the noxious troll Violentacrez), the book works as a portrait of both internet culture and a startup-turned-phenomenon reckoning with success.--Chad Comello Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reddit, a social news aggregation and discussion website that brands itself as "the front page of the internet," is as varied, fun, vile, and tedious as the rest of the web, according to this scattershot business history. Inc. journalist Lagorio-Chafkin recounts the founding of Reddit in 2005 by pals Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian; helping out was Aaron Swartz, a 20-year-old eccentric programmer (at one point he was on an all-Cheerios diet) and "open access" advocate who later committed suicide in 2013 after being indicted for computer fraud. The book's central theme is the tension between Reddit as populist platform that lets its users control the discourse by upvoting their favorite links, exploring their every whimsical interest (and, in some corners, wallowing in porn and racist memes), and Reddit as new-media juggernaut that struggles to profit off its users' activity-in part by muzzling its less presentable voices. Despite Reddit's potential as a case study in the clash between cultural values and business values on the internet, Lagorio-Chafkin's bloated narrative bogs down in turgid office politics as Reddit cycles through staffers and CEOs with little growth beyond the swelling site traffic. The resulting soap opera about corporate nerds isn't convincing enough to hold attention. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Journalist Lagorio-Chafkin (Inc. magazine) relates the story thus far of Reddit, the popular social sharing and discussion website, primarily through the perspective of its cofounders. The author describes the initial odd couple partnership between the programming wiz Steve Huffman and outgoing idea man Alexis Ohanian, the site's rise from obscurity at the Y Combinator tech incubator, the eventual estrangement and departure of founders, questions of how to profit from a website, and the triumphant return of the creators to save the site. Though some of the history has already been told by Ohanian (Without Their Permission) and onetime CEO Ellen Pao (Reset), Lagorio-Chafkin's access to Huffman and Ohanian provides continuity. On a site where anonymity and freedom of speech are paramount, there is inevitable tension between the community-building potential and the trolling and abuse that can grow in such an environment. Content and behavior policies have developed over the years as the company matured and tamed or excised some of the site's seedier elements. VERDICT Recommended for Reddit users and those curious about the social and business aspects of Internet free speech.-Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The messy business of tech culture as seen through the threads and histrionics of Reddit.Noted technology journalist and Inc. senior writer Lagorio-Chafkin diligently peels back the layered, tumultuous history of controversial web startup Reddit, which began as a discussion board platform envisioned as "the front page of the Internet." The author began writing about the online sensation in 2011 after meeting with Reddit's co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, friends who met and instantly bonded at the University of Virginia in 2001. Unsure her project's material would be sufficient for a full-length book, Lagorio-Chafkin amassed a stockpile of firsthand information from scores of interviews with current and former employees, leaked chat logs, and other sources. This surfeit of detail becomes more problematic after the author establishes the tech company's early origins and "wondrous traffic beast" growth, spurred by Huffman and Ohanian's keen development of the Reddit theoretical framework alongside Aaron Swartz, a "hacker prodigy with a libertarian bent and a flair for the dramatic." Once Cond Nast's 2006 acquisition of the site made young millionaires of the trio, their relationships with each other and with the industry changed. Ohanian's mother's death in 2008 radically shifted his perspective. A few years later, Huffman handed over his CEO post to a successor, and Swartz committed suicide after being charged in an MIT wire fraud scandal. More leadership shake-ups would occur within the Reddit executive echelon before both originators returned to the company in 2015 after changes had been made to detoxify the site's much-abused "user anonymity and almost-anything-goes content policy." Lagorio-Chafkin captures the ensuing vortex of tech-nerd office politics with a novelistic flair, but her verbosity hijacks some of the excitement of the site's rise to prominence. Still, die-hard Reddit fans and readers dazzled by the machinations of the technology and web development business will enjoy the hijinks.A readable, melodramatic treatment of the ascent of a popular internet startup. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
