We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internets Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internets Culture Laboratory Reviews

• 
  Jennifer

  Basic 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 follow-up 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 thought-provoking. 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!
• 
  Dianna

  At times a more thorough than interesting account of the people behind Reddit, and amazing to see how small the team was for so long, as Reddit continued to grow.
  
  The book summarises the Violentacrez controversy, references the controversial/horrible sub Reddits (a few more of which were banned early 2018) and covers The_Donald and the site’s hate group platforms.
  
  Not a lot of space is given to how staff and leaders actually felt about some of the worst Reddit moments. Possibly because it’s not a focus - Reddit is not alone in being an enormous thing grown from a bright idea turned into reality by smart young (white) men. And they talk about their achievements as ‘hey we just do the thing, wow it’s now a big thing, and doesn’t everyone like cat pics, and it’s not our fault the world is also full of jerks.’
  
  
  
  
• 
  Beth Dean

  I love stories of tech startups. There's something so compelling about the genius and somewhat naive optimism of the founders. Scenes of them coding in humble basements, apartments, and garages are as exciting as suspense movies to me. (The system has been breached! Abort! Abort!)
  
  Reddit's birth has surprisingly less drama than I would have thought, though it does have its fair share. I believe being part of Y Combinator, a tech startup fund that nurtures and guides its recipients, helped them find their way more smoothly. Unfortunately, the pratfalls seem to have mostly come after they were acquired.
  
  Lagorio-Chafkin follows a few tributaries that flow away from the story, such as Swartz's night as a homeless tourist. It's hard to fault those streams of consciousness to nowhere, though, because they add such interesting color to the story.
  
  Good book about an insanely addictive platform. It makes me want to take a scroll through Reddit right now, in fact.
  
  
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• 
  Christine

  3.5 rounding up. The book markets itself as a story about the founding and growth of reddit, but it's really more the stories of the reddit founding crew with updates periodically about where reddit was at the same time. This book could've been 250 pages and focused solely on reddit but instead it's 450 pages. There was a lot about Paul Graham ("PG") at the beginning, then some reddit, then mostly Aaron Schwartz, reddit, Ohanian's political career, reddit, Huffman's internal struggles, reddit, etc. The book was still interesting, but it read disjointed because there were so many characters to follow.
• 
  Richard Kriheli

  I enjoyed this book more than the Instagram story book (No Filter) which I read earlier. Always fascinated by the early seed/growth days of formidable tech giants and the Reddit story does not disappoint. This book was well researched and documented and told in a very digestible, easy-flowing manner. Nothing profoundly new that I hadn't already read about over the years in countless articles and exposes but the early history stuff is always very engaging.
• 
  Abdul Wahid Khan

  The book talks about the journey of one of the most visited and nerdy social network reddit. I started using reddit a few years back. Found that the discussion on subreddits is quite vibrant. I have also used its content for one of my research project. So, this book fulfilled my curiosity to know more about how this unusual but highly popular social network came to be. It is not just the story of reddit but everyone involved with it especially Huffman and Ohanian, and the Wired magazine that I like reading. Read this book if you like to know about tech, startups, and friendship!
• 
  Yuriy Demkovych

  An honest insight into crazy ride that Reddit and people that make it had since it started as a small news swapping platform. Good learnings from all the bad decisions that nearly buries the business as well as interesting timeline on how society and companies evolved in the last 10 years in their acceptance to controversy and all the bad stuff existing online.
• 
  Alexandra

  I was kinda sad to finish the book.
  
  a great mix of narrative arc and non-fiction.
  
  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.
• 
  Cecilia

  I really enjoyed this history of Reddit. It felt written and edited with wisdom and love, and its short chapters helped me stay engaged. I look forward to the author's next project!
• 
  Aditya Hadi

  Tepat pada perayaan tahun baru 2019 yang lalu, saya mendengar episode terbaru dari Podcast yang memang secara rutin saya dengar, yaitu Recode Decode yang dipandu oleh Kara Swisher. Dalam podcast berdurasi sekitar 41 menit tersebut, Swisher mengundang seorang jurnalis bernama Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, yang baru saja meluncurkan buku tentang sejarah Reddit.
  
  Buku tersebut berjudul:
  We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
  
  Saya sendiri mempunyai pengalaman yang bagus dengan buku-buku bertema serupa. Beberapa buku tentang sejarah startup yang kemudian menjadi favorit saya antara lain:
  
  -
  The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
  -
  Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal
  -
  The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
  -
  The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy
  -
  Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
  -
  Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
  
  Karena pengalaman-pengalaman tersebut, dan karena saya juga merupakan salah satu pengguna Reddit, maka sepertinya sudah cukup alasan untuk membaca buku tersebut.
  
  Jujur, sebelum membaca saya menaruh ekspektasi yang rendah untuk buku ini. Mereka bukan perusahaan raksasa yang telah masuk bursa saham seperti Amazon, Tesla, dan Twitter. Mereka juga bukan perusahaan dengan tim operasional di berbagai belahan dunia seperti Uber dan Airbnb.
  
  Saya pun berpikir, akan semenarik apa sih sejarah dari Reddit?
  
  Namun setelah selesai membaca, harus saya akui bahwa buku ini sangat layak untuk masuk ke dalam daftar buku favorit yang saya sebutkan di atas. Selain karena gaya bercerita sang pengarang, Lagorio-Chafkin, yang runut dan selalu memunculkan kalimat-kalimat menarik di akhir setiap bab, cerita perjalanan Reddit sendiri sudah merupakan sesuatu yang sangat menarik.
  
  Saya sampai bingung mengapa selama ini belum ada satu buku pun yang mengangkat kisah mereka, padahal Reddit sudah muncul sejak tahun 2005. Per bulan Maret 2019 kemarin, Reddit mengaku telah mempunyai 542 juta pengunjung bulanan, dan menempati posisi ke-6 dalam rangking situs yang paling banyak dikunjungi di Amerika Serikat (dan peringkat ke-21 di seluruh dunia).
  
  Dari berbagai sisi, baik proses pendirian startup, bisnis yang mereka jalankan, hingga karakter penggunanya, Reddit merupakan hal yang menarik untuk dibicarakan. Berikut ini adalah beberapa di antaranya:
  
  - Reddit didirikan oleh dua founder yang saling melengkapi. Alexis Ohanian yang punya karisma sebagai seorang CEO, dan Steve Huffman yang hebat dalam merangkai kode pemrograman dan membangun produk.
  
  - Sempat ditolak masuk gelombang pertama program akselerator Y Combinator yang baru saja didirikan oleh Paul Graham hingga sempat depresi, namun akhirnya dipanggil kembali dan diterima.
  
  - Awalnya mereka berniat membuat aplikasi pemesanan makanan, namun kemudian mereka beralih membuat Reddit yang mereka sebut sebagai “The Front Page of Internet” setelah menerima masukan Paul Graham.
  
  - Karena potensi yang dimiliki Reddit, Ohanian dan Huffman akhirnya mengajak beberapa peserta Y Combinator yang lain untuk bergabung dan bersama-sama mengembangkan Reddit dalam sebuah induk perusahaan yang bernama “Not A Bug” (dari istilah populer “It’s a feature, not a bug”).
  
  - Meski hanya mempunyai tim yang berisi empat orang; sudah termasuk Ohanian yang bukan developer dan sibuk dengan beberapa urusan pribadi, Christopher Slowe yang masih bekerja secara full time di Harvard, dan Aaron Swartz yang sangat pintar namun mempunyai masalah kepribadian; mereka akhirnya diakuisisi oleh Conde Nast.
  
  - Di bawah perusahaan besar seperti Conde Nast, yang memiliki beragam perusahaan media seperti Wired, Reddit tidak bisa terlalu bebas dalam mengembangkan produk dan merekrut karyawan. Satu per satu founder mereka mengundurkan diri.
  
  - Conde Nast akhirnya melakukan sesuatu yang kontroversial dengan mengubah Reddit kembali menjadi startup, dan membuka peluang investasi untuk para investor lain.
  
  - Aaron Swartz, seorang founder jenius dari Reddit yang aktif dalam perjuangan mempertahankan kebebasan berekspresi di internet, harus pergi untuk selamanya :(
  
  - Drama soal pengelolaan karyawan, mulai dari kontroversi boleh tidaknya kerja remote, hingga pemindahan kantor secara tiba-tiba yang tadinya tersebar di beberapa kota menjadi dipusatkan di San Francisco. Seorang CEO Reddit bahkan sampai mengundurkan diri dengan cara yang tidak lazim, hanya karena keinginannya memindahkan kantor dari pusat kota ke daerah pinggir kota ditentang dewan direksi.
  
  - Meski telah “keluar” dari Reddit, para founder seperti Ohanian, Huffman, dan Slowe tetap tidak bisa melepaskan hati mereka dari Reddit. Mereka akhirnya kembali untuk menyelamatkan bisnis tersebut dari akhir yang kelam. Kini Huffman merupakan CEO di Reddit, sedangkan Slowe menempati posisi CTO.
  
  
  
  Reddit pun menjadi “rumah” tidak hanya bagi konten yang lucu dan bermanfaat, namun juga bagi konten paling absurd dan menjijikkan di internet. Seluruh CEO Reddit yang terus berganti selalu berusaha melakukan apa yang mereka bisa untuk memperbaiki hal ini.
  
  Pengguna Reddit sempat mendapat sorotan publik dalam beberapa kasus, seperti: tuduhan terhadap orang yang diduga merupakan pelaku peledakan bom di Boston, namun ternyata bukan; penyebaran foto tanpa busana para selebritas; hingga sebuah sub-Reddit terorganisir yang mendukung pencalonan presiden Donald Trump.
  
  Selain cerita-cerita di atas, masih banyak kisah lain yang ditulis oleh Lagorio-Chafkin di buku ini dengan cara yang indah, mengedepankan prinsip-prinsip jurnalistik, dan penuh dengan cerita humanis. Buku ini seperti menjadi bukti bahwa bisnis startup bukan hanya seputar teknologi dan uang, namun lebih soal perjuangan manusia-manusia di belakangnya, mulai dari para founder, karyawan, hingga para pengguna.
  
  Menurut saya, pemilihan judul “The Internet’s Culture Laboratory” untuk Reddit merupakan sesuatu yang sangat sempurna. Mengapa? Karena startup mana yang pernah mengalami perjalanan seperti Reddit?
  
  Mulai dari masuk Y Combinator dengan ide yang bukan milik mereka, dikunjungi oleh banyak pengguna dalam waktu cepat, diakuisisi perusahaan besar meski hanya mempunyai 2,5 developer (dan kemudian kembali menjadi startup), mempunyai seorang founder jenius yang kemudian meninggal karena kondisi mentalnya yang terganggu, mengalami banyak drama terkait pengguna dan karyawan?
  
  Reddit seperti menjadi sebuah studi kasus yang menunjukkan tentang apa yang harus dilakukan (dan tidak) oleh seorang founder startup ketika baru memulai bisnis, saat tengah memasuki masa pertumbuhan startup, hingga ketika akan diakuisisi perusahaan lain. Reddit pun seperti mengajarkan bagaimana cara yang tepat (dan tidak tepat) dalam mengelola konten yang diunggah oleh para pengguna, sehingga tetap bisa berada di batas antara kebebasan berekspresi namun tidak mengganggu dan membahayakan pengguna lain.
  
  Saya rasa tidak ada lagi cerita menarik seperti ini. Kalaupun ada, sangat jarang sekali. Karena itu, buku ini pun menjadi salah satu buku paling provokatif dan menginspirasi yang pernah saya baca.
• 
  Michael Huang

  The details behind the -- as the title says -- "tumultuous life" of one of the most visited websites in the US. It tells how the founders didn't even think about doing such a site but was egged on by incubator; how after hiding the bad part of their business, they managed to sell it to Conde Nest who has no idea how the site really works and left the employees alone; how one crazy CEO after another wreaked havoc to the culture of the company; and how porn and hate speech were fiercely protected as some point because the site is worried that a user revolt would ensue if they start to censor.
  
  
• 
  Elliot T.

  Before The Social Network, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's 2010 acclaimed 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 world-changing 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 behind-the-scenes guy. At the center of the story is Steve Huffman. And just as Sorkin made Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg reflect the insecurity his website supposedly breeds, Lagorio-Chafkin is eager to depict Reddit as an extension of Huffman and his quirks.
  
  The book'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 Facebook's newsfeed, were not a part of the original design, but eventually came to be the platform's defining characteristic.
  
  Lagorio-Chafkin 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 well-known. 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.
• 
  Jane Trucksis

  I'm that old lady at the office who always has to call IT to have them change my passwords when they expire. I'm the one who says I read something "on the computer" instead of "on the Internet." And if what I read is more than two paragraphs, I have to print it out first, since it doesn't feel like really reading to me if I read it on a screen.
  So I thought that reading a book about Reddit would be a tough slog. I thought I'd be confused by the terminology, that it would be over my head. Boy, was I wrong! Not since I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go have I felt myself so strongly drawn from one chapter to the next, not wanting to stop reading. I've been late back to work from lunch more than once because I had to read just ONE more chapter.
  Lagorio-Chafkin is a great story teller. I felt like I was watching Huffman and Ohanian grow and evolve, from college students to millionaires running a very successful website. To see how naturally it came about was a revelation. It wasn't as if they started out with any grandiose plan. They had an idea, found a guy who could help them make it happen, steered them in a different direction, and on they went. You feel like you know these guys by the end of the book, and it was very encouraging to find that they could transcend their differences and get back together, and keep improving Reddit.
  Now I have a better idea of what nerds are, too. When I was a kid, we didn't have that term. There were the "brains," the smart kids; the "bad" kids who were always getting in trouble; and the rest of us, who fell somewhere in between. Maybe our "brains" are now "nerds," but I think it's more than that. Nerds are not just brainy, but so absorbed in their pursuits that they will bust their asses to make something work, and achieve their successes almost without knowing how much they've done.
  When they got their first million, in the acquisition of Reddit, it never occurred to them to quit working, slack off and party. Oh, sure, they had the three year "earn-out" which required them to keep working at Reddit at least that long, but they WANTED to. They loved what they did, and probably would have done it for peanuts. That alone floored me, and gave me an understanding of people who work when they don't have to. Some do it out of greed, of course, and others because their work is their whole life. But the nerds are just driven to make it better, whatever they are doing, and we reap the benefits.
  Now, if I could just figure out how to sign up with Reddit! Every time I try to create an account, I get a message that I can't use symbols in my user name, and I don't think I am, but........
• 
  Olivia Barrow

  When I first picked up this book, I thought, "Woof, how can it possibly take 500 pages to tell the story of Reddit?"
  
  However, it was a fast and well-worthwhile read, that connects many pieces of Silicon Valley lore that I was peripherally familiar with, but hadn't fit together in my mind (e.g. the origin of Y Combinator, Ellen Pao's life after Kleiner Perkins, and how Serena Williams came to marry the cofounder of Reddit.)
  
  Reddit's story is ridiculous. The company should never have succeeded. And yet, somehow, they did, and somehow managed to become cemented in the world's mind that this is what a startup looks like. Why would we model ourselves after such a clearly dysfunctional team?
  
  Right before reading this book, I had the chance to interview Lisa Calhoun, founder of Valor Ventures -- Georgia's first VC form run by a woman. I asked her what’s more important, a really good idea or a really talented founder?
  
  Her answer put me in my place, and now, thinking about it after reading this book, feels like the most perfect explanation for Reddit’s success-in-spite-of-all:
  
  “It’s a false question,” Calhoun said. “The real thing to pay attention to is it the right market. If it’s the right market, you can work with a pretty good founder and a pretty good idea. In a great market, many decent ideas with reasonable, rational teams, WORK!”
  
  Paul Graham (creator of Y Combinator) identified the vast untapped potential of the internet for fostering communities around discussing the news. He then found two smart, driven dudes who were a decent fit for the market, and gave them enough funding to get to work.
  
  This book chronicles some of the best moments in Reddit’s history, such as r/place and the AMA with Obama. And while it’s a bit clinical in its approach, it’s a good way to catch up on Memes You May Have Missed from the last decade.
  
• 
  Deane Barker

  Wonderfully complete history of Reddit, from the childhood lives of founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, through the (ultimately tragic) life of Aaron Swartz.
  
  The book has short chapters, and is mainly episodic -- each chapter covers some moment in the history of Reddit, and they're all there: the rise of /r/The_Donald, Spezgiving, the Boston Bombers, the Fappening, and on and on. In reading it, I was struck at how far Reddit has come. It's been around for over a decade, and as the title reads, it's become something of a "culture laboratory" -- a Zeitgeist of our ages.
  
  Additionally, you begin to appreciate how hard it is to keep control of it, if you could at all. The editors and community team are basically riding a bucking bronco, trying to hang on. You can't direct Reddit, in as much as you can only hope to contain it and perhaps suggest where it should go.
  
  And the book covers the business (or lack thereof) behind Reddit. How mismanaged it has been, the comings and goings of dozens of people, the search for a CEO who would stick around, the comings and goings and comings again of Ohanian and Huffman, their sometimes-contentious relationship, the moving around the country of the office, and the curious case of Reddit Gifts, which, for a long time, was the only thing keeping the site in business.
  
  Great book. Wonderful read, especially if you've spent as much damn time on Reddit as I have.
• 
  Andrea

  Reddit is a social media company that, compared to Google or Facebook, we know nothing about. Yet, it has helped shape culture in many ways over the years. This book tells you how it did that, taking you all the way back to Reddit's creation in 2005, to how, when, and why it was first formed, and it shows you how it has evolved over the years, up until the early days of 2018. It also narrates the life of its founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, as well as of associates like Aaron Schwartz and Chris Slowe. The book is very thorough, going into detail of a lot of stuff that maybe it is not that necessary to write about. Nonetheless, this book is a very interesting read. Highly recommended for everyone interested in learning the history of Reddit and how it transformed social media through the years.
• 
  Ivy Digest

  This is the first book of business journalist Christine. She extensively interviewed two of four founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman.
  
  redditors [they don’t capitalize] will rejoice at the detailed reporting of reddit’s convulsive start. It reads like a five-part serial drama, complete with imagery and dialogue. Busy readers can scan the index for particular topics.
  
  Startups can learn lessons from the founders’ struggles with pornography, hate speech, spam, grisly content, monetization, PTSD, leadership woes, founders’ falling out, employees, politics, and trying to go public. It’s a great behind-the-scenes look at how a democratic website is built and managed.
  
  @IvyDigest
  
  https://www.instagram.com/p/BuexgfSBK...
  
• 
  Georg

  “We are the nerds” provides a ton of insights into the foundation and development of a start-up. My conclusion I derived: building a successful startup its all about people, their skills, opinions, likes, dislikes, relationships, expectations and all that, at least much more that I thought before I read the book. We normally only see the final success, the “unicorns”, the billions behind it. But there is no blue print for success.
  I really enjoyed to read all the details the author revealed to us. As a reader you are able to build your own perspective, the book is not moralizing or opinionated.
  The book touches a very current topic: allowing “free speech” on a social platform versus management of hate speech/ fake news/ discrimination/ manipulation.
  Really enjoyed the book.
• 
  TΞΞL❍CK Mith!lesh

  Reddit is the sixth most-visited website in the world, yet millions of people have no idea what it is and how it operates. We Are the Nerds is all about the birth and rise of Reddit. The book reveals Reddit’s central role in the dissemination of culture and information in the 21st century.
  
  Christine Lagorio-Chafkin does a phenomenal job in telling the story of how Reddit’s founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, transformed themselves from student video-gamers into Silicon Valley millionaires as they turned their website into an icon of the digital age.
  
  We Are the Nerds is brilliantly written and packed with insights and lessons for building startups.
• 
  Denny

  This isn't the kind of book I'd typically be interested in, but this one caught my eye, and I'm glad it did. Lagorio-Chafkin does a nice job of personalizing and humanizing a veritable phone book of big tech industry players and weaving the many twisted, varying threads of their stories into an interesting, informative, and relatively seamless narrative. Chloe Cannon is a competent narrator, but her habit of mispronouncing "and" as "end" and "can" as "ken" is extremely annoying.
• 
  Furious Gazelle

  TL;DR: This book heavily focuses on the business side of startups and the personal lives of the Reddit founders. If you're not already interested in one of those two things, this is probably not the book for you.
  
  In this thick tome, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin faithfully traces Reddit’s history from its 2005 inception to the present day. We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory reads like a real-life version of HBO’s Silicon Valley. Caveat: real life is a bit less interesting than TV, so this book may only appeal to those with an interest in business or diehard Reddit fans.
  
  This book is part biography of Reddit, and part a story of the company’s path from conception to corporatization, and its rocky journey towards becoming self-sustaining (turning a profit). Chafkin touches upon the problematic aspects of Reddit: users who choose to share revenge porn, child porn, as well as the harassment and doxing of women, and so on. However, while she frowns on these, she doesn’t dive deeply into the ethics of the site. For the most part, this is a faithful biography of Reddit’s founders and of the company itself. It’s organized event by event, going through every significant event in Reddit’s history. Some of these are intriguing – I didn’t know that Reddit played a part in organizing the Daily Show’s Rally to Restore Sanity, for example.
  
  However, Chafkin goes into what was (for me) a boring amount of detail about the personal lives of the founders. Unless you already care about Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, and Aaron Swartz, this book goes into way too much detail – like, we get updates on the health of a woman Alexis Ohanian once dated briefly in 2004. They had a rocky relationship! I’m going to file that under ‘things I didn’t know I didn’t want to know, but now I do, oh well’.
  
  Read the rest of our review at
  http://thefuriousgazelle.com/2018/10/...
• 
  Mehul Jangir

  Not as good a read as I expected it to be, primarily because I use reddit a lot and I expected an account of its history to be based more on the product rather than the people running it or the social lives of the people running it. Before reading this book, I was expecting an account of reddit's journey as a product, not as a business. Furthermore, the book goes off on various tangents, everything from Ohanion's relationship with Serena Williams to Aaron Swartz and net neutrality. While I feel this may have been necessary to attract a larger audience (Aaron Swartz attracts tech-savvy people and Williams is just famous), it isn't related to reddit whatsoever. However, there were some aspects of this book I found fascinating. One of these was Huffman's return, which sounded quite poetic. I was surprised by how he wasn't able to fit in and needed a counsellor/therapist. I also found the entire "spezgiving" saga to be quite childish, but it really brought out how big businessmen/women are the same people as us, and how they're prone to the same mistakes. I also found it interesting to read about how people are targeted online and the internet's potential to be downright toxic (seeing as I've encountered a very small portion of this toxicity myself), but how its countered by the internet's ability to be wholesome, helpful, and amazing. The best example of this, in the book, was perhaps Barack Obama's reddit AMA, or perhaps the "Mr Splashy Pants" thing. While there were some likeable facets to the book, it doesn't really do justice to its title.
• 
  Book Grocer

  Have you ever heard of the online platform Reddit? Many people haven't, but surprisingly, it's become the sixth most-viewed website in the United States. However, success didn't come easy. In We Are The Nerds, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin 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 $1.8 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
  
  
  Purchase here for just $12.00
• 
  Aaron Lee

  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 the 500 pages 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, that 1) the simplest mechanisms (upvote and downvote) can be more effective than complex rating systems and data science algorithms; and that 2) what 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 behind-the-scenes 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.