We Are the Nerds summary

The early twenty-first century has been largely defined by the stunning rise of Silicon Valley. Within a decade, a small group of tech-savvy twentysomethings created services like PayPal and Uber, which would go on to transform our societies and economies. The meteoric rise of this elite group of startups is often the cause of a misconception – namely, that anyone with coding skills and a concept can make billions. In reality, the road to online dominance is often slow and difficult. So, how did Reddit do it?

Essentially, it was Graham’s insistence on developing a minimum viable product – MVP for short – which shaped Reddit in the early days. An MVP is the cornerstone of what’s since become known as a lean startup – a no-frills operation that ignores what big companies traditionally spend a lot of time and money on, like scalability, internationalization and security. Graham wasn’t interested in slick designs or fancy features. What he wanted Ohanian and Huffman to deliver was a streamlined version of their product that simply worked, and quickly!

“The company makes the feast,” according to an old English proverb. What this means is that it’s the people you’re with, rather than the trappings of the occasion, that matter. Ohanian and Huffman would discover the truth of the idiom when Reddit hired a certain Aaron Swartz.

You might know Swartz as the internet wunderkind who ended his own life at the age of just 26 after being prosecuted for hacking the academic journal JSTOR. But Swartz was a legend among programmers long before his death. No wonder – he’d already co-written the RSS 1.0 standard, a method of syndicating news content, by the time he was 14. A gifted computing mind with a pronounced anarchical streak, he seemed a perfect match for Reddit.

By the fall of 2006, Reddit was thriving. Although still in its infancy, it had just under a million monthly readers. New subreddits like r/DIY were booming while “not safe for work” content – the term soon became a simple euphemism for porn – hosted on pages like r/NSFW drew in seemingly endless streams of viewers.

While that wasn’t much compared to the numbers generated by other sites, it was an outstanding achievement for a website that was just 16 months old. Reddit had put itself on the map, and other companies were beginning to pay attention. Condé Nast, the New York-based media giant behind magazines like the New Yorker and Wired, was one of them. In October 2006, it acquired Reddit. As it soon found out, there was more to this new kid on the block than met the eye.

Reddit continued to expand at a steady clip over the three years following its acquisition by Condé Nast. It doubled its traffic every six months, added new features and consolidated its reputation as the front page of the internet. From the outside, it looked like a phenomenal success. But that was largely down to its hilarious crowdsourced content.

Take a gag that made the rounds in 2008, the year the European Organization for Nuclear Research – EONR – completed its work on the Large Hadron Collider. The New York Times ran an article considering whether the research facility might open a black hole. The photo it ran alongside the story featured a scientist who bore a striking resemblance to Gordon Freeman, the hero of the video game Half-Life. Ironically, Freeman’s role in the popular first-person shooter is to fight off alien creatures who arrive on Earth through a portal to another dimension with a variety of weapons, including a distinctive red crowbar.

“The customer is always right.” It’s a favorite business maxim, and for good reason. But when it comes to Reddit, customers aren’t just always right – there wouldn’t even be a product without them! That’s something the company learned from watching what happened to a competitor, Canadian content aggregator Digg, when it rubbed its users the wrong way.

In 2010, Digg received $40 million in venture capital. As always, its investors weren’t contributing their hard-earned cash out of the goodness of their hearts. They wanted returns – the bigger, the better – and Digg redesigned its user interface to give publishers a way of promoting paid content. “Digg 4.0,” as the flashy new version of the site was called, wasn’t popular. In resistance to this act of “commercialization,” its users abandoned the platform and defected to Reddit.

While Reddit’s infancy was pretty rocky, that was nothing compared to the controversies that engulfed the site as it entered puberty. That’s when the effects of the site’s uncompromising attitude toward free speech first became fully apparent. The results weren’t pretty.

Free speech absolutism meant letting anyone say anything they want. In the world of Reddit, that led to the emergence of some pretty appalling communities. Take the r/Anarchism thread. Posts advocating rape, terrorism and violence came a dime a dozen. When Reddit tried to convince moderators to dial it down a notch, they were met with indignant refusals and abuse.

Ohanian and Huffman’s departure left a void at the top of Reddit. The board needed a talented leader to unite the staff, promote Reddit’s founding values and deliver growth. Their first choice was Yishan Wong, who became the company’s first CEO in 2012. But he wouldn’t last long in his new position. Stress would once again get the better of Reddit’s leadership.

Wong’s primary target – making Reddit profitable – was a mammoth undertaking. But he did give it a go. During his tenure, the platform experimented with new revenue streams like “Reddit Gold.” That was essentially a premium membership that gave users extra features, allowing them to turn off advertising and create custom avatars. It was a neat idea, but it didn’t get the company much closer to its goal.

2015 was a bad year for Reddit. It was under fire for hosting hate speech on its site while its employees were demoralized and, frankly, miserable. But there was a silver lining. Reports of Pao’s heavy-handed management style had reached Redditors, who quickly mobilized to call for her resignation. When an online petition in favor of her exit gathered over 200,000 signatures in the summer of 2015, Pao bowed to popular pressure and quit.

That once again left a vacuum at Reddit. Who should fill it? Well, it was time for Ohanian and Huffman to return to their old company. Five years of therapy and new projects had been good for the duo. When news of Reddit’s troubles broke, Huffman reached out to Ohanian, and they organized a meeting in a restaurant to talk out their differences.