Reddit experienced some tumultuous periods of time during its early years in existence.

Yishan Wong, who became Reddit's CEO in 2012, described managing the community as "beekeeping."

Other employees saw Reddit as a vast and untamable realm composed of hundreds of massive and unique ecosystems, some of which were dark and hard to contain.

The below excerpt from Christine Lagorio-Chafkin's book on Reddit, "We Are the Nerds," reveals some of the things employees had to deal with, from threats and doxing, to pictures of penises, corpses, and child porn.

The following is an adaptation from "We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory" by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.

As Yishan Wong settled in to his new dream job as Reddit CEO, he scheduled an AMA for himself for April 20, 2012. Wong was nervous, but not ill-prepared.

Wong had become a power contributor on the Q&A site Quora, developing a reputation as a Silicon Valley insider who frequently and unceremoniously pulled back the curtain. In response to queries from strangers, he discussed Facebook and other tech companies with a remarkable earnestness. He was blunt, and that read as honest.

On the day of his AMA, Wong logged in as u/yishan and saw the questions rolling in. How would he fix Reddit's remarkably slow and ineffective search function? (He wrote he'd work to make it faster and more accurate.) He was asked about improving the site's self-serve ad platform and about making money in general. (Yes, Wong wanted to fix it; no, advertising wasn't the entire solution.)

To a user who asked him about the Reddit 'hivemind,' Yishan responded that 'managing the community is kind of like beekeeping.'

Redditors were like bees—difficult to manage—and the best he could do was create conditions to keep them happy. "Flowers and stuff," he wrote. "But occasionally something will piss off the bees," he continued, and "they will swarm around and sting you. You really can't do anything about it, but also the swarm eventually goes away. And like beekeepers, you just need to be wearing decent protection, or have a thick skin."

The hivemind online seemed open to Wong's stewardship, but inside the office he still had a remarkable struggle that hadn't yet turned around from the moment he was hired. The staff was no longer mutinous, but they still harbored skepticism of their new boss. When it came to uniting and managing an unsympathetic staff, Wong was a novice.

…

To Reddit's staff, change was not just scary; it was almost inconceivable. The five full-time employees and several contractors had been largely in control of their own, and Reddit's, destiny.

They had their own metaphor for Reddit's community—an ocean, a vast and untamable realm composed of hundreds of massive and unique ecosystems, of which they were omniscient guardians.

Read more: Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian issued an ominous warning for Facebook: 'We've hit peak social'

It possessed wide swaths of beautiful coral, incredible Technicolor creatures. But it also had dark depths, and deep trenches within those depths, in which terrifying predators lurked, and underneath which plates could shift, and a destructive volcano could spring up.

Each employee had developed in-depth subject-matter knowledge of Reddit's darkest and most problematic trenches, particularly those in the scrappy community team.

Marta Gossage specialized in legal matters and became adept at reporting crime and potential suicides to authorities. She'd also been a clever spam fighter, taking down botnet rings that would post and upvote content aimed at directing traffic or making money.

She called out publications at which she'd found too many upvotes from one IP address; individuals located in or near the offices of Forbes and the Huffington Post, she said, were the worst offenders at trying to game Reddit's popularity algorithm to promote their own posts— something Reddit did not allow.

Gossage developed a daily triage routine. After waking up early in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, she'd spend an hour or more checking in on recently problematic subreddits, such as whatever was bubbling up at the time in the Violentacrez universe, say, r/picsofdeadjailbait, his attempt to outfilth r/jailbait, which was now banned.

Next, she'd check the subreddits where moderators lobbed their complaints and questions, such as r/modnews, r/modhelp, and r/modclub.

With the worst out of the way, she'd make breakfast and brew a pot of coffee. Then she'd dig into reported messages—private comments users had received and flagged as abusive, offensive, or pornographic. She took to calling this portion of her morning "D--- and Coffee."

The single biggest category of messages Gossage had to review was pictures of penises.

There were so many d---s! They were, by and large, sent by men to unsuspecting and unwilling women, some of whom had either previously posted photos of themselves on Reddit or had asked for relationship advice.

Gossage would view each reported message and attached image—shooing away her boyfriend if she was working at home—and diplomatically explain to the users who'd sent unsolicited pictures of their genitalia that this was unacceptable. She'd coach them in the basics of online etiquette.

Most men were defensive, and she often found herself arguing with repeat offenders, some of whom might send dozens of unique pictures in a single day.

Banning users was a judgment call for the community team. Sometimes it was clear-cut, but when a member of the community team had to make a difficult decision on content or take action based on a user's bizarre behavior, they'd simply call or chat one another for a "sanity check."

'We had so few rules for so long,' said Alex Angel, who'd stuck with her Reddit internship through graduation and was now living in New York City and working as a community manager at Reddit.

Reddit has come a long way since the early days. Reddit

"It was manageable and it worked. Only when catastrophic events happen do you reevaluate everything that you stand for."

The most time-consuming subreddits were not necessarily the most noxious ones. What most bedeviled Reddit's small community team was the endless infighting between various subreddits with opposing viewpoints.

Another problem: hostility between white and male-centric subreddits (known for veering into misogyny and white supremacy) and the minority groups and women who had to worry about harassment across Reddit.

Sexism, both casual and overt, was so rampant across Reddit that a Reddit business manager once told a reporter that she'd recommend women altogether avoid r/gaming, which at the time had 1.5 million subscribers, because it was simply too hostile to women.

In September 2011, a victim of sexual assault posted her story to the women's forum r/TwoXChromosomes, including photos, and Redditors accused her of lying and faking her wounds with makeup.

In December, a fifteen-year-old posted a photograph to the atheism subreddit and was met with hundreds of comments about what they wanted to do to various parts of her body, whole comment threads filled with quips about rape and blood and memes pondering child abduction.

By this time, a group of Redditors had launched a section of the site dedicated to chronicling and fighting the types of racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and other objectionable content that bubbled up all over: r/ShitRedditSays, or SRS. It was moderated by a uniformly feminist league who dubbed themselves "Archangels."

In many ways, it is hostile to Reddit's prevailing culture. Typically, even the top posts on SRS have a net negative karma; voting is actually discouraged. "Pretend the rest of Reddit is a museum of poop. Don't touch the poop," its rules read. Naturally, a counterforce arose to attack what they saw as whiny social justice warrior behavior.

The most prominent anti-SRS subreddits were named r/antisrs and r/SRSsucks. These forums— loosely antifeminist and strictly pro–free speech—birthed a rapidly expanding universe of affiliated subreddits, including r/SubredditDrama, r/menkampf, and r/subredditcancer, which sought to expose corruption among "social justice warrioposters."

There being no straightforward way to explain the variety of arguments arising from these warring subreddit clusters, using the gender binaries made sense to some. Some dubbed the anti-SRS sites the Himisphere.

The original SRS sites it took on were known to some as the Shevil Fempire.

The dueling factions may have been confusing in the early 2010s, but after the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath, they're much more recognizable as the seeds of identity-conscious leftists and factions of the alt-right.

In this little battleground, threads devolved so quickly into finger-pointing, hate speech, and doxing, it was hard for the handful of Reddit community managers to keep up.

These metastasizing rival forces were noxious and pervasive in their tactics: They engaged in mass attempts to silence or sink rivals by downvoting their points of view (or, conversely, upvoting en masse content they wanted to see rise on their opponents' subreddit). At times they seemed almost entirely dedicated to being Trojan horses within Reddit, invading subreddits they didn't like (which is known on Reddit as "brigading").

Another all too effective tool in each side's arsenal was co-opting tactics, and even vernacular, from 4chan and video-game chat. The resulting vibe was trollish and alienating to outsiders. "Crush the Redditors with your Dildz," one graphic on SRS read. ("Dildz" would be dildos, just the sort of weapon individuals who are fighting men who disparage women imagine their sexist targets would imagine their league of gnarly feminists wielding. Go ahead and read that sentence again.)

Vote brigading was strictly against Reddit's etiquette, but subtle and complex instances snuck by. Battling spam was hard, but fighting users who'd engage in spamlike or harassing behavior on their own was harder—particularly when individuals teamed up.

Reddit's handful of community managers had to solve these conundrums while being harassed themselves.

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian at Business Insider's 2018 IGNITION conference. Jin S. Lee/Business Insider

For Alex Angel, many days were entirely taken up policing the SRS universe and its opposition. She mostly kept to protocol when issues arose here and elsewhere, trying to message moderators through modmail, the internal Reddit mail system, where she was sometimes known as Alex.

Her somewhat feminine Reddit handle, though, may have hurt. She'd frequently step in on problem Reddit threads, asking people to knock off their behavior, and commenters would sometimes note that an admin, u/cupcake1713, was a girl. They doxed her and posted her photos in threads.

Erik Martin, their boss, took on some of the toughest tasks of community management himself. He dealt with grisly content, pictures of violence, corpses, hate-speech-like threats, and sexualized images of minors.

When r/MensRights would be labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, or when Reddit would be accused of harboring a child-pornography ring, he'd be the one journalists called, whose name would appear in the press, associated with this stuff. He directly interacted with the most problematic users who created the worst content.

He sometimes met them in person and often would bring along Mog, his chocolate brindled pit bull mix, whose name rhymes with "dog." This small and highly collaborative team formed a united front that, over time, had developed its own coping mechanisms and internal sense of humor in response to dealing with such an array of complaints, bizarre questions, and sporadic threats.

This stuff— government subpoenas for private user data, floods of d--- pics ,instances of child porn—could not be understood by their partners at home.

They were isolated together, and began to see themselves as special; each had contributed insurmountably to this delicate, beautiful, and wild ecosystem.

It wasn't all dank troughs: These employees had fostered positive communities, witnessed charities bolstered by Redditors' support, seen cancer victims embraced and lifted up by the community.

Each employee deeply adored Reddit. At one point, Martin posted, "I love not knowing what Reddit tomorrow will bring. It's like being in love with someone who has a constantly expanding and mostly beautiful multiple personality disorder."

With all that in mind, Reddit's staff couldn't fathom how someone with Wong's background—the way he was prone to ranting online; the way he'd been entrenched in Facebook's bureaucracy— could ever be the Triton of their raging ocean.

For Wong, this collective everyone-is-hunkered-down-in-battle mode appeared to be an unseemly defensive posture with the broader Reddit community. He diagnosed his new staff as "all smart, good-hearted people, who had been basically subjected to this horrible environment, for years, and therefore traumatized."

Excerpted from the book "We are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory" by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, published on October 2, 2018 by Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright 2018 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.