![]() While writing this review, I poked around Reddit. CoonTown was finally banned by Reddit in 2015. 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. The charismatic Ohanian came back as well, trying a few Reddit spinoffs that fizzled. Huffman returned and purged most of the staff. The backlash led to her abrupt departure. ![]() His replacement, Ellen Pao, tried to impose order in the office and on the site. A community manager who had a brief tenure in 2015 told Lagorio-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. Reddit became so offensive it was difficult to work there. “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. “In the old days the new money was made through theft and abuse of office,” he wrote. ![]() Aaron Swartz was brilliant, troubled and impossible, but he saw the tech economy more clearly than well-medicated people. “We Are the Nerds” is most compelling when it tells the story of a third young man who played a founding role at Reddit. It’s all here anyway: the lack of adult oversight the suck-up press the growth-at-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. You can’t blame this one on Vladimir Putin. Reddit was created by millions of Americans with a taste for darkness. The buyer was Condé Nast, home of America’s toniest magazines, but executives there had no vision either. Its founders, barely out of their teens, had no real vision. If anyone bothered to look, Reddit was proof that on the internet, the trolls were in charge.įounded in 2005, soon after Facebook, Reddit has always been something of an anomaly among companies whose content was generated by users. 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. Google, figuring it had solved the problems of the living, launched a venture to defeat death.Įven then, at a moment of techno-optimism we are unlikely to see again in our lifetimes, Reddit was a toxic swamp. Journalists revered Twitter for giving a megaphone to oppressed groups like, well, journalists. $28.įive 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. ![]() WE ARE THE NERDS The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory By Christine Lagorio-Chafkin Illustrated.
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