Premise: The history of the website Reddit from its founding to the present day,
Short Plot Synopsis: This book tracks the founding of Reddit and follows its founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian through the site's infancy, troubled adolescence and hopefully long adult life.
The Good:
I never visited Reddit before reading this book in fact, I didn't fully understand what Reddit was exactly, yet I was completely interested the entire time I was reading this book.
I think that's always a good sign, don't you
The book is easy to read and you get invested in learning about the people involved in making Reddit and in the site's continued life.
The fact that Reddit was involved in so many different cultural "zeitgeist" moments makes it feel fresh and relevant.
You'll realize that you knew more about Reddit than you thought,
As I mentioned before, you don't have to have any interest or experience with Reddit to enjoy this book.
It isn't overly technical, but I do think it presents an inside view of what goes into the making of sites like these: the hours of time, the accidental nature of how a decision made on the fly can have ramifications down the road, how interconnected tech companies are.
It seems like every friend of Huffman and Ohanian founded another website that is in regular use today, The book also presents a lot of food for thought about what constitutes free speech and how much it needs to be protected.
Due to Reddit's freeform "open" nature, it led it to become a breeding ground for some pretty controversial and ugly subreddits.
It makes you think about the struggle that the site faces and continues to face: how much should it let these groups flourish For this reason, I think this book is about a lot more than the story of Reddit.
It becomes a book about freedom of speech and where the limits of that freedom should be,
The Bad:
Some pretty nasty groups found a home and a voice on Reddit, and the books covers many of these controversial groups and discussions getting into subject matter that some might find offensive.
For this reason, I would recommend caution when reading the book, If you're easily offended, you might find some of the subject matter in this book to be disturbing,
I found that I just wanted more, . . more details, more followup on particular stories, I felt like the book could have been longer but that is just because I became so engrossed in some of the stories and wanted to find out more.
It wasn't a failing of the author she just had a lot of good material and had to tell the story she was telling and couldn't go down every rabbit hole she found.
You'll find yourself wasting even more time online than you do now if you weren't already familiar with Reddit.
I found myself going onto the site to see what it was all about and spending way more time on it than I should have.
It feels a bit addictive in a way,
I would have loved to see some photos, Note: I received an early review copy of the book via Amazon Vine so perhaps the finished book will include photos.
I found myself Googling many of the people mentioned in the book to find out more about them,
Final Thoughts: This was a fascinating read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, It was educational, informative and thoughtprovoking, I actually read this book because my husband wanted to read it but didn't want to have to write a review of it so I agreed to read it.
I'm so glad I did! Have you ever heard of the online platform Reddit Many people haven't, but surprisingly, it's become the sixth mostviewed website in the United States.
However, success didn't come easy, In We Are The Nerds, Christine LagorioChafkin discusses the birth and tumultuous life of Reddit, The book covers the creators, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, as they were given an idea and loan and created one of the most visited websites in today's world.
But when Reddit became an offensive space for hatred, violence, sex, and antisemitism, the stress of how to address the user's freedom of speech became difficult to navigate.
Now, with censorship rules and new profitable elements, Reddit has become a,billion company and has become the unofficial "front page" of the internet,
The compelling story of a tech startup, This is a sharply written and brilliantly reported look inside Reddit, the wildly popular, often misunderstood website that has changed the culture of the Internet.
Paul The Book Grocer
sitelinkPurchase here for just, Before The Social Network, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin'sacclaimed adaptation of Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, it was hard to imagine that the story of a website's creation and growth would be of interest to anyone who didn't major in business or computer science.
Since then, the centrality of social media in nearly every aspect of our lives has made the premise that such stories might be dramatic or even glamorous much more plausible.
Every era's worldchanging technologies need creation myths, And while We Are The Nerds is more interested in providing the definitive journalistic account of Reddit's rise, drawing from interviews with all of the figures central to its creation, some of its characters have an archetypal feel.
There's the cursed genius, the charismatic huckster, the modest behindthescenes guy, At the center of the story is Steve Huffman, And just as Sorkin made FaceWe Are The Nerds's Mark Zuckerberg reflect the insecurity his website supposedly breeds, LagorioChafkin is eager to depict Reddit as an extension of Huffman and his quirks.
The We Are The Nerds's lack of the breathless desperation that tends to attach itself to so many success stories is relieving.
It doesn't waste time selling us on the importance of Reddit it assumes that if you've picked up the book, you're aware of Reddit and its place in the online world.
Among the more surprising revelations at least to me is that the actual idea for the website came not from Huffman nor Ohanion but from their moneyed funder, Paul Graham.
Also of note: the comments, like FaceWe Are The Nerds's newsfeed, were not a part of the original design, but eventually came to be the platform's defining characteristic.
LagorioChafkin hits all the highs and lows that one expects from a book chronicling the company's history.
While the lows were often sudden and very public e, g. , The Fappening, or the misidentification of the Boston Marathon bomber, the highs tended to be gradual, private, and thus less wellknown.
The sale of Reddit to Conde Nast and Advanced Publications feels quite different when seen from the inside, as we experience Ohanion and Huffman's windfall and subsequent identity crisis with them.
By focusing more on the personal chemistry of the founding team and less on the initiating idea, the story is less nerdy and more compelling than I'd expected.
Reddit's middle years make for particularly good drama, as its focus changes, its userbase grows, and its CEOs run up against
the inherent limits of managing massive anarchic social spaces.
And just when the hour is darkest, the creator returns,
We Are the Nerds is not the story of the website, a story that, aptly, has been told and retold on various subreddits and will continue to be retold until the site goes dark.
This book tells the story of the company, In doing so, it reminds us how easy it is to overlook the human stories behind the cold, corporate veneer.
When considering this company, this website, or any other large group of faceless individuals, we'd do well to apply the axiom: remember the human.
I was kinda sad to finish the book,
a great mix of narrative arc and nonfiction,
CLC does such a good job of being dispassionate that I was never really sure how she felt about anything reddit did or didn't do.
A fascinating story about one of the more interesting "social networks" around, It does not lack details, and is engaging enough that I wanted to finish thepages in a few days.
The first part of the book was interesting for its retelling of how simple principles and choices made by Huffman and Ohanian led to what Reddit is today I picked up some start up tips here, for example, thatthe simplest mechanisms upvote and downvote can be more effective than complex rating systems and data science algorithms and thatwhat powers reddit is simple actions votes, comments, posts, moderating done by individuals but at scale.
I'm also now inspired to read up on Paul Graham and his philosophy,
The only negative thing I have to say about this book is that it's a "jack of all trades master of none".
There is the front row seats of start ups and entrepreneurship the focus on Ohanian and Huffman's relationship and rift an inside look into Ohanian and Serena Williams relationship origins a behindthescenes of American culture wars through the lens of reddit and so on.
Maybe it's actually a plus that it covers so many issues, but I just felt like there wasn't a coherent theme throughout.
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