WE ARE THE NERDS

The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory

By Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

Illustrated. 492 pp. Hachette Books. $28.

Five 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. Journalists revered Twitter for giving a megaphone to oppressed groups like, well, journalists. Google, figuring it had solved the problems of the living, launched a venture to defeat death.

Even then, at a moment of techno-optimism we are unlikely to see again in our lifetimes, Reddit was a toxic swamp. 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. If anyone bothered to look, Reddit was proof that on the internet, the trolls were in charge.

Founded in 2005, soon after Facebook, Reddit has always been something of an anomaly among companies whose content was generated by users. Its founders, barely out of their teens, had no real vision. It wasn’t even their idea. They cashed out as soon as they could. The buyer was Condé Nast, home of America’s toniest magazines, but executives there had no vision either. Reddit was created by millions of Americans with a taste for darkness. You can’t blame this one on Vladimir Putin.