We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

Overview

Named a Best Book of 2018 by Fast Company, this is a "sharply written and brilliantly reported" (Shelf Awareness) look inside Reddit, the wildly popular, often misunderstood website that has changed the culture of the Internet.

Reddit hails itself as "the front page of the Internet." It's the third most-visited website in the United States -- and yet, millions of Americans have no idea what it is.

We Are the Nerds is an engrossing look deep inside this captivating, maddening enterprise, whose army of obsessed users have been credited with everything from solving cold case crimes and spurring tens of millions of dollars in charitable donations to seeding alt-right fury and landing Donald Trump in the White House. We Are the Nerds is a gripping start-up narrative: the story of how Reddit's founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, rose up from their suburban childhoods to become millionaires and create an icon of the digital age -- before seeing the site engulfed in controversies and nearly losing control of it for good.

Based on Christine Lagorio-Chafkin's exclusive access to founders Ohanian and Huffman, We Are the Nerds is also a compelling exploration of the way we all communicate today -- and how we got here. Reddit and its users have become a mirror of the Internet: it has dingy corners, shiny memes, malicious trolls, and a sometimes heart-melting ability to connect people across cultures, oceans, and ideological divides.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316435406
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	635,653
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin is an award-winning journalist who has covered culture, emerging technologies, and entrepreneurship for the past fifteen years. She is senior writer at Inc. magazine and her work has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post. She was raised on a sheep farm in rural Wisconsin and now lives in New York City with her husband, cats, and toddlers. Her favorite subreddits are r/blep and r/ShowerThoughts.

Table of Contents

Author's Note x

Part I

This Guy Has No Shame 3

How to Start a Startup 14

Not Your Standard Fixed-Point Combinator 25

Front Page of the Internet 37

It's Online 42

Hell Summer 56

How to Act Like a Real Adult 62

Rounding Error 69

The Algorithm and the Cupboard 78

You Are Making Us Sound Stupid 90

We Are the Nerds 100

The Deal 107

Part II

Chasing That Moment 113

Millionaires' Ball 117

You Aren't a Bank Teller 128

A Moment Before Dying 130

The Physicist, the Information Cowboy, the Hacker, and the Troll 136

Mister Splashy Pants and the Large Hadron Collider 144

Benign Neglect 153

Tools, Yo 160

Part III

Take Me Home 169

The Ones That Got Away 178

Geek Woodstock 189

Exodus and Ill Will 195

Free-Speech Sandbox 203

Blackout 211

Meet Your New CEO 219

NOT BAD! 227

The id 233

Part IV

Omniscient Guardians of the Depths 251

The Internet Bus 267

The 117th Boston Marathon 271

Money on the Mind 278

Every Man Is Responsible for His Own Soul 290

Tiny Boxes 300

Unbelievable Because It's So Weird 306

Closer to Yes 310

The Poltergeist 315

10 324

Part V

Revenge and Revenge Porn 329

Fame and its Inverse 337

AMAgeddon 344

The Return of Steve 356

Fuzzy Approach 363

"Serendipity" and "Bullshit" 375

r/The_Donald 381

Spezgiving 395

What's Good for the United States 402

This Is My Whole Life 406

Reddit4.0 416

Salesman Emeritus 423

Live from Hollywood 432

All Together Now 443

Acknowledgments 454

Sources 457

Notes 459

Index 477

What People are Saying About This

New York Times bestselling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg - Adam Grant

“This is the untold story of how one of the world’s most popular websites was hatched—and how it took on a mind of its own. It’s a gripping read, and it’s full of lessons for building startups and organizing communities.”

Editorial Reviews

"This is the untold story of how one of the world's most popular websites was hatched--and how it took on a mind of its own. It's a gripping read, and it's full of lessons for building startups and organizing communities."—Adam Grant, NewYork Times bestselling author of Originals, Give and Take,and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

"We Are the Nerds is the best, grittiest, most accurate book yet about what it's like to build a startup and a community from scratch (a struggle I know well). And it's a great story; truly fun to read! Lagorio-Chafkin takes us back to a formative time for the modern web, helping us understand what can go wrong--and right!--when we try to harness the power of online community (and make money along the way)."—John Zeratsky, formerdesign partner, Google Ventures, and New York Times bestselling authorof Sprint and Make Time

"I've heard every start-up story you can imagine, but Reddit's is as fascinating as it gets. Christine has captured what it really looks like to start a company and turned Reddit's struggle for success into a gripping, entertaining book that is a must-read for every entrepreneur."—Daymond John, star ofABC's Shark Tank, bestselling author of Rise and Grind, andfounder of FUBU

"Lagorio-Chafkin's book is incisive, witty, and brilliantly written. She gives you a front-row seat to the world-altering consequences of the decisions made by a cast of compelling, though sometimes stumbling, humans on the front lines of the Internet--nerds and all."—Emily Chang, authorof the national bestseller Brotopia

"Christine Lagorio-Chafkin has stepped into a male-centric genre, the start-up narrative, and produced a book of monumental power and importance: a rich, thoughtful chronicle of Reddit that grapples just as brilliantly with the dark side of tech--its trolls, its problems with gender and diversity--as it does its culture-shattering innovations. I was wowed by this book."—Liza Mundy, NewYork Times bestselling author of Michelle and Code Girls

"Excellent.... Learn how the internet's front page got its mojo back."—Business Insider

"A classic 'we were coders once, and young' tale.... Lagorio-Chafkin fearlessly explores Reddit's dark edges."—Wall Street Journal

"Really three tales in one ... that of a scrappy start-up destined for web domination,... [the] technologists, entrepreneurs and iconoclasts seeking to reshape the world, ... [and] the rise of social media from the perspective of one of its most important players.... The reader feels like Forrest Gump, stumbling from one remarkable event or person to the next... We Are the Nerds describes how Reddit began. The real story is how the site and its ilk will change the world. On that, we're still in Act One."—Nature

"Fascinating.... . Drawing on dozens of original interviews with Reddit's founders and employees, old chat logs and photographs and e-mails, Lagorio-Chafkin .... re-creates key moments in novelistic detail.... Sharply written and brilliantly reported, We Are the Nerds is an eye-opening look at how Reddit helped shape contemporary Internet and political culture in the United States."—ShelfAwareness (starred review)

"Lagorio-Chafkin's assured narrative makes even crashing servers the stuff suspense thrillers are made of."—Mental Floss

"[We Are the Nerds] tells the inside story of how Reddit came to be the Internet's 'id.'"—Ars Technica

"A great book."
—Bloomberg Radio

From the Publisher

07/16/2018
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.)

Publishers Weekly

2018-08-13

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 Condé 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.

Kirkus Reviews