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

I woke up in Austin, Texas, on March 13, 2011, to an email from Alexis Ohanian. He explained that I must have swapped business cards with one of his programmer colleagues the prior evening, because mine had been passed on to him for safekeeping. That was certainly possible; it was my first time navigating the five days of over-the-top marketing stunts and extreme networking known as the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, and as a new reporter for Inc., Id swapped a lot of cards. Ohanian proposed a coffee. He wanted to introduce me to his business partner, a hacker who had started a new tech company. Hours later, at a caf called Halcyon on Lavaca Street, I was seated across from Steve Huffman.

Huffman pitched me on his new travel-search website, Hipmunk, which allowed people to sort flights based on the agony their itineraries would induce. Once hed finished, Ohanian gave me a vinyl luggage tag featuring a chipmunk wearing old-timey aviator goggles.

I didnt want a luggage tag, and, if Im really being honest, I didnt care a great deal about Hipmunk. Id jumped on the meeting because I had an inkling these two young men might be remarkable. Huffman and Ohanian had started Reddit back in 2005, a few weeks after they graduated collegelong before they started slinging plane tickets.

By this time, in early 2011, if you were working in media you were keenly aware of the Reddit hug of death. That is to say, when a news story was endorsed (upvoted, its called) by enough Reddit users (Redditors, theyre called) to earn a spot on the sites homepage, it would send your website so much lucrative traffic that it could cripple your servers. At the time, Reddit had just exceeded a billion page views, after tripling in traffic over the past year. But Reddit was more interesting than the raw numbers. Huffman and Ohanian had created a Petri dish for discussion and proliferation of the most interesting, funny, and awful parts of the Internet. The site was gloriously anarchic, allowing users rather than individual editors to select the stories front-page readers were shown. This led to stunts, memes, nerdy in-jokes, and massive collective acts of charity. It also resulted in lots of limit-pushing, so that youd often find hate speech and misogyny smattered in with the derpy dog photos and Star Wars memes. Entire separate forums were dedicated to fat shaming, racist ideologies, and revenge porn.

One currency of Reddit is known as karmapoints awarded to users for creating popular posts or comments. Another, increasingly, seemed to be raw outrage. Users debated everything, but especially the decisions of forums moderators and Reddits own policy and enforcement. Watching controversy unfold became known as munching on popcorn, as if the lurker had a front-row seat to a feature film.

How, I wondered, did something this nutty and sprawlingthis mirror of the entire Internetcome out of the brains of these two apparently normal guys?

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My curiosity about Reddit would not be sated on that day in Austin. Huffman and Ohanian had left Reddit years ago by this point and had measured interest in talking about it. But I was persistent, and back in Brooklyn, Ohanian and I met at a caf on Atlantic Avenue halfway between his loft overlooking the Brooklyn waterfront and the apartment I shared with four roommates on noisy Flatbush Avenue. He told me the Reddit origin story.

It was the most improbable startup journey Id ever heard. I wanted to learn everything. The next time we met, I pitched Ohanian on speaking to me exclusively for a book. I also flew to San Francisco and asked Huffman to give me his time and attention for the same purpose. They both said yes. I knew Id gotten extremely lucky, but I didnt know that by this time, just months since Id first met them, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder in a tiny coffee shop booth, the two men were no longer on speaking terms. There was plenty more I didnt know. An ocean, really.

Over the next few years, I conducted dozens of interviews, racked up introductions to current and former Reddit employees, and pored over leaked chat logs and old photographs. In the meantime, Reddit, as its userbase swelled and its leadership tried to transform it into a profitable company, underwent a series of staffing convulsions and scandals that would have proven the downfall of many startups. A well-regarded Silicon Valley insider was installed as the new CEO, and, in the midst of a massive pornography scandal, raised $50 million. Shortly after, he flamed out under mysterious circumstances.

Silicon Valley feminist hero Ellen Pao, who famously sued a top venture capital firm for gender discrimination, was promoted to chief executive. In 2015, Pao too would be forced out after a user revolt that included sexist attacks, personal threats, and which culminated in a near-site-wide blackout. It appeared as if Reddits enormous community, by then the seventh most popular site on the American Internet, might snuff itself out.

During Reddits roller-coaster adolescence, Ohanians and Huffmans stars had risen. After becoming the face of the tech worlds efforts to solve net neutrality, Ohanian wrote a book and became an in-demand speaker at U.S. college campuses and tech conferences. Huffman followed a less flashy, though no less impressive path; he became one of the startup worlds most respected chief technology officers. Life hadnt been all rainbows, though. There was the widening rift in the friendship of the two founders. Also, Ohanians mother had died of brain cancer, Huffmans marriage was deteriorating, and in early 2013, their onetime friend and business partner, the hacker wunderkind Aaron Swartz, under indictment for wire fraud and computer fraud, had hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.