Reddit's morality play

In book 'We Are The Nerds', author Christine Lagorio-Chafkin recounts the rise of Reddit as the oft-heard story of unexpected start-up success that then waded into controversy

At a time when tech giants like Google and Facebook are facing increasing scrutiny from governments over both the content on their platforms and their business activities, one website, no less popular but managing nevertheless to operate under the radar, has continued to grow its user base with some voluntary firefighting. 

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, both graduates from the University of Virginia, as a space where users could coalesce around similar interests. The fora that resulted, called subreddits, soon exploded. Users shared their views on everything, from politics (r/politics) to education (r/SAT) to more meme-worthy topics (r/aww).

In the book under review, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin recounts the rise of Reddit as the oft-heard story of unexpected start-up success that then waded into controversy. The book reads like the script of a film, which may be intentional given the outsize success The Social Network brought to Ben Mezrich from whose book the film was adapted.

Ohanian and Huffman wanted to create a site where users would decide the priority of the topics/discussions that make it to the front page (for this reason, Reddit was dubbed “the front page of the internet”). In this respect, they were the harbingers of Web 2.0 that shifted online power from admins to users, a trend that was observed at other tech giants like Twitter and Facebook.

The early sections of the book describe the duo’s journey, as they pitched their idea to Paul Graham of the then-nascent Y Combinator, a start-up incubator that has since become the byword for mentorship success in Silicon Valley. This is classic nerd territory, as Ohanian and Huffman battled their tech insouciance with the demands of pitching their idea and asking for money. The team had a third pole, Aaron Swartz, the mercurial proponent of uninhibited online access, who killed himself in 2013.

Once the book is finished setting up the scene, it moves to the more pertinent issue of censorship on Reddit, a hot-button issue that has plagued the site since its founding. As with other social media giants, Reddit found that its founders’ libertarian stance on free speech did not always meet the standards of ethical propriety or, more worryingly for the investors, profitability. 

The problem was on two fronts: One, the rise of clearly illegal content -- such as pornography and peddling of drugs -- that the site had to move quickly to ban. The other kind of content, dubbed trolling in the mainstream media, proved to be more problematic to censor.

One of the arguments against Reddit has been its enabling of alt-right voices that bandied together to, in the liberal’s imagination, place Donald Trump in the White House. This is certainly partly true, as the site has been a hotbed of right-wing ideology that, on some fora, tips to the extreme.

Yet, the site’s problems also reflect the larger media climate of today. Since most respected media outlets lean liberal, it is left to user-managed sites like Reddit to host conservative opinion. The lack of conservative reporting and analysis in the mainstream media breeds the conditions that make conservatives flock to Reddit. To be sure, not all conservatism on the site has been salubrious, and there is some merit to the accusations that the site has hosted hate speech. But the easy labelling of any voice that does not fit liberal definitions as trolling has vitiated the debate. 

Reddit also faces the growing pains of any user-run tech company. Ellen Pao, the celebrated plaintiff in a gender discrimination trial against a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, resigned as CEO in 2015 after backlash from users over the firing of an employee who managed the site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” feature, a moderated Q&A with celebs.

The incident brought to the fore the control users held over the company, not just in their ability to protest but in actually running the site. Every subreddit is managed by an army of dedicated moderators whom Reddit must humour if the company wants them to continue what is effectively unpaid work (moderators work for bragging rights, just as Wikipedia editors work gratis).

While Lagoria-Chafkin is meticulous in describing the timeline of Reddit’s troubles, her opinion on the controversies in which the site has been mired skews liberal. While this gives her the opportunity to express ample shock at some of the things that made it to the site, it leaves the reader no better informed about the dynamics that drive social media use along political lines. 

Today the company is more stable. After a slew of different persons in charge, Huffman has returned to the top spot in what is another recurring feature of Silicon Valley: Founding frenzy, followed by a period of chaos and controversy, and the return of the prodigal founder. Steve Jobs at Apple and Jack Dorsey at Twitter spring to mind.

Will Reddit find its way to profitability? That is a harder question to answer. We Are The Nerds is an engaging, if unoriginal, account of the rise of the Silicon Valley tech giant, a story that, in spite of the diversity of services provided, seems to follow a fixed template, including the troubles that ultimately come to descend on nerd haven.

We Are The Nerds

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

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

Hachette

492 pages; Rs 699