When Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian met at the University of Virginia in the early 2000s, each recognized something of himself in the other. Both college students were smart, good with computers and filled with more ambition than most middle-aged CEOs. They also had their differences. Huffman was a quiet, coding savant with a penchant for pranks, and Ohanian was a charming people person. Like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, they were an ideal duo for launching a tech start-up. Fate agreed, and in a few short years they became founders of the popular website Reddit. According to Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, in her fascinating history of the site, We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory, the world would quite literally never be the same.
The book traces Reddit's history from the moment it went live to its arguably significant influence on the 2016 presidential election. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with Reddit's founders and employees, old chat logs and photographs and e-mails, Lagorio-Chafkin, a senior editor at Inc. magazine, re-creates key moments in novelistic detail. Among the highlights is how some Reddit users exploited the site to cultivate one of Trump's largest online supporter groups consisting of "racists... alt-righters... former Bernie Sanders supporters... Russian propagandists... and anyone lured by the promise of a place that tolerated Islamophobia." Sharply written and brilliantly reported, We Are the Nerds is an eye-opening look at how Reddit helped shape contemporary Internet and political culture in the United States. --Amy Brady, freelance writer and editor