The Rancorous Rise of Reddit

Home , Alexis Ohanian, Ellen Pao, Reddit, Steve Huffman

A Alexis Ohanian(left)andSteveHuffmanfoundedthesocial-mediawebsiteRedditin2005. 34 | NATURE34 | 2018 VOL | OCTOBER 562| 4 ship strained. Feted replacements such as lost by heart; had 2010, both their friend left, a cultural mismatch. Huffman and Ohanian credibility on its young founders, but it was over ayear after launch, bestowed wealth and magazine publisher Condé Nast in 2006, just redemption. Reddit’s to New sale York-based Steve Jobs: foundation, separation, return and resemblesthis legend the of Apple founder destined for web domination. Superficially, showman). But it is really inone. three tales technical brains) and Alexis Ohanian (the of story the co-founders Steve Huffman (the pany phenomenon. and social Ostensibly, it’s in 2005,and its evolution as awebsite, com Reddit’s traces Lagorio-Chafkin emergence to Reddit. terms of spent time by each user. Welcome five, but it others the beats all hands down in Not only is it listed at an impressive number and LinkedIn. But one might entry surprise. —Yahoo!, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram top ten is composed of other familiar names Amazon (which owns The Alexa). rest of the States are YouTube, Google, Facebook and Timo Hannay The rancorous rise of Reddit INTERNET The is first story that of a scrappy start-up We Are the Nerds with most traffic fromwith most United the traffic company Alexa.com, websites the ccording to Internet-analytics by journalist Christine extols ahistory ofthe website’s evolution inour tumultuous era. - - Ohanian’s surprise toled Huffman and 2015 rapprochement for narrative the arc, a users. Neatlybetween porn revenge of spate rebellionsstaff to a followed,Crises from Reddit the ied spirit. never quite embod investor Pao Ellen articles, and was caught. The ensuing legal covertly millions downloaded of academic Incensedcoding. by publishers’ he paywalls, morebecame with taken campaigning than journey, programmer Aaron Swartz quickly albeit a one.tragic Hired at the start of Reddit’s remarkable event or person to next. the feels like Forrest Gump, stumbling from one toseeking reshape world. the The reader technologists, entrepreneurs and iconoclasts try. Here, Reddit in isa network a node of indus technology twenty-first-century early- the concerns wayward creation. revitalization of their return —and the Science publishingScience makes an appearance, story second The ©

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- - L i m i Hachette (2018) CHAFKIN CHRISTINE LAGORIO- Laboratory Internet’s Culture of Reddit,the Tumultuous Life The Birthand We Are theNerds: t e d .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . staple in which anyone from A-listers to the inanpart Ask Me Anything or AMA,aReddit met), president then-US Barack Obama took Charlottesville (where Huffman and Ohanian wholesome. At University the of Virginia in become cultural and battlegrounds. political central to perceptions the of billions, and have no longer mere geeky distractions. are They arecosts and they benefits of such services, sion. Whatever one about thinks social the world,the Reddit was built to foster discus bles to them broadcast random thoughts to cultivate online personas and Twitter ena important players. If Facebook lets users of frommedia one perspective the of its most parochial but world powerful of web. the people comprise circles the of influence in the zine former editor-in-chief of maga technology bator that begat Reddit) to Anderson, Chris Mountain View, start-up California (the incu Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator in it’s a who’s of who nerd aristocracy, from Paul Butparts. for anyone familiar names, with the might track of lose vast the array of walk-on sensitive young himself, man aged killed 26. battle principled, this ended in2013,when In August positively 2012,it seemed all ofThe third rise the social traces story As second narrative this unfolds, readers Wired . It areminder is also of how few - - - -

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A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT

terminally obscure (I’ve done two) answers questions. Obama was a natural, typing his own answers and signing off with a Reddit Books in brief catchphrase: “NOT BAD!”. The crowd went wild. Four years later, it was all very different. This Is the Way the World Ends Reddit, as We Are the Nerds shows, was Jeff Nesbit Thomas Dunne (2018) always a venue for the edgy and degener- Environmental expert Jeff Nesbit delivers a scientifically rich ate, fostered in part by its anonymity. But by overview of how the impacts of climate change are affecting 2016, some of this was going mainstream. natural resources in the here and now. He reveals how oceanic and The forum (or ‘subreddit’) r/The_Donald atmospheric shifts are triggering losses in species from pollinating had become an important cheerleader for a insects to phytoplankton, fatal heatwaves are becoming regional divisive US presidential campaign. The vol- norms and water stress could spark new waves of mass migration. unteer moderators kept just inside the rules. It Nesbit’s blueprint for surviving these systemic issues — centring on became a prolific disseminator of misleading efficient resource use, innovation and infrastructure — is arguably memes — with consequences that everyone sketchy, but overall this is a cogent analysis of a creeping crisis. now knows but no one yet fully comprehends. If Obama was the presidential incarnation of change-the-world techno-optimism, Trump Plagues and the Paradox of Progress now personified a revenge of the trolls. Thomas J. Bollyky MIT Press (2018) In August 2017, white supremacists and From polio to tuberculosis, infectious diseases are no longer the opposition demonstrators went head-to-head leading cause of death in any region. Yet this triumph is paradoxical, in Charlottesville. Huffman was furious, and argues Thomas Bollyky in this rich, incisive study. Bollyky, director of the incident triggered a clampdown on cer- the Global Health Program at US think tank the Council on Foreign tain far-right groups across Reddit. This was a Relations, shows that in too many lower-income countries, any gains major milestone on the journey from the site’s in public health are counterbalanced by poor health-care systems, freewheeling origins to a dawning realization illiberal governance, low employment, rampant urbanization and that online communities, like societies, need booming populations. A thoughtful reminder of the social, economic rules. An obvious question is why unaccount- and political complexities inherent in sustainable public health. able individuals such as Huffman (or Face- book founder Mark Zuckerberg, or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey) should be the ones setting them. Wally Funk’s Race for Space The story of social media is ironic. The Sue Nelson Westbourne (2018) most powerful decentralizing technologies In 1961, as NASA made superstars of astronauts such as John Glenn, in history — the Internet and the web — have their medical supervisor, William Randolph Lovelace II, was secretly led to the greatest concentrations of power. training 13 female flying aces for space. The ‘Mercury 13’ programme Friction-free information and the death of was axed, but the ambitions of trainee Wally Funk never died. In this distance have not ushered in a new Enlight- compelling portrait, space journalist Sue Nelson reveals how Funk enment, but enabled every crackpot belief (now nearly 80) became the first female US aviation-safety inspector, and bile-drenched enmity to gain adherents. has hobnobbed with luminaries such as Italian astronaut Samantha Technologists, anxious to avoid any ‘single Cristoforetti, and is in training for the first Virgin Galactic flight. As point of failure’ in their systems (the reason Nelson notes: “What a life she has had while fighting to right a wrong.” everything from disk drives to data centres is duplicated) have built single points of failure for society. A well-aimed post or algorith- Innate mic tweak can mislead, enrage and divide Kevin J. Mitchell Princeton University Press (2018) on a national or global scale. At its all-too- The nexus of neuroscience and genetics can be murky. Not so in common worst, this is not so much social neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell’s study on human diversity, which software as social malware. probes with clarity and balance how variation in our genetic The main story of the book ends on a high. program causes variation in outcome. Mitchell reveals that Huffman is the boss of a major website valued environmental effects tend to amplify, not counteract, innate at well over US$1 billion. Ohanian, Reddit’s differences. He uses that framework to examine psychological first promoter and now its executive chair, is a domains such as perception, conditions including schizophrenia, celebrity (and married to tennis phenomenon and the dubious ethical and social implications of ‘designer babies’ Serena Williams). To paraphrase Jobs, both and other trends. A powerful antidote to genetic determinism. have helped to put a dent in the Universe. But this is no happily-ever-after fairy tale. We Are the Nerds describes how Reddit The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History began. The real story is how the site and its ilk Kassia St Clair John Murray (2018) will change the world. On that, we’re still in Fabrics are knitted into human history, from the Silk Road to the Act One — and the story is being written by mechanical looms of the Industrial Revolution. Here, design writer us all, one thoughtful blogpost or belligerent Kassia St Clair explores the connection in 13 beautifully wrought tweet at a time. ■ stories. We visit a cave in Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains where dyed fibres more than 30,000 years old have been discovered; goggle Timo Hannay is the founder of education at the starched intricacy of sixteenth-century lace ruffs; flinch over technology company SchoolDash.com, based astronauts’ nappies and the sodden sleeping bags of early polar in London. expeditions; and savour the idea of materials spun from spiders’ e-mail: [email protected] webs. A joyful commingling of text and textiles. Barbara Kiser