I am not a Redditor, but I think I might give it a try after reading this book. I'm not interested in disgusting porn or horrible racist rants. Nor am I particularly interested in photos of cats that look like Hitler. But millions of serious people write interesting things on Reddit, and, while it might take me a while to get the hang of it, I think it will probably be fun to read along.

This is the story of Reddit's birth, infancy, teenage meltdown, mature growth, mid-life crisis, and recovery, if indeed it has recovered. The book's full of great anecdotes and, for those of us somewhat outside the .com world, it gives interesting background on some of the characters we see in the tech news today.

Back in the day I was on the fringes of the free speech movement and I was particularly interested in how the internal debate within and about Reddit has evolved. Although I don't like the long subtitle tacked onto this book, Reddit has really been a free speech laboratory. When and how should speech be restricted? Reddit, and other social media platforms deal with this every day and the argument is fascinating.

Ms Lagorio-Chafkin's writing is clear and free of unneeded jargon. Although the book is fairly long, the story progresses quickly. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased opinion.

“We are the Nerds” is the story of Reddit and its founders. Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman were part of the first Y Combinator group, a program created by Paul Graham to encourage and potentially fund new startup companies, especially in the tech field. During that summer, they created Reddit, which has grown to become the fourth most visited website on the Internet. This book explores all of the bumps in the road, scandals, and successes along the way.

Before reading this book, I knew of Reddit's existence but didn't know much about it. I had visited the site once but found it confusing to navigate and didn't ever go back. This book was very informative and definitely helped my understanding of how Reddit works; I think I will check it out again. My only complaint with the book was that it got a little hard to keep track of all the employees named in the past few years, although that was bound to happen with how much they expanded their workforce.

We Are the Nerds is not the type of book I usually read. I much prefer fiction to non-fiction. However, the premise of this book caught my attention. I'd never visited the Reddit website and I knew next to nothing about it but was curious to learn how it works. This book looks at the people responsible for the development of Reddit and how Reddit grew from a small start-up to what it is today.

Although I thought We Are the Nerds to be overly long and occasionally bogged down by details that seemed unnecessary to the flow of the narrative, I found it a very easy book to delve into. Reading about the lives of the founders of Reddit, as well as all the machinations that tore them apart, proved to be a fascinating read. I don't think the I'll ever become a Redditor, but I now understand how, by 2017, this website rose to become "the fourth most popular website in the United States, behind only Google, YouTube, and Facebook."

I didn't know much about Reddit's history, so I wanted to see how deep this book went with it. I was impressed with the amount of access and the information that flooded this book. If anyone is looking to know how Reddit started and the journey that the company went through along the way, this book is a must-read. It's a good sized book, but once you dive in, it's a breeze to read. You'll be too interested to want to put it down more than you have to.

We Are The Nerds tells the story of the birth and tumultuous life of REDDIT, the Internet's culture laboratory. It may be a surprise to many, but I do not spend much time on reddit at all. I am aware of what it is and I know a ton of people who spend hours there checking everything out but for whatever reason it never really clicked as a place for me to check out. However, I am a nerd and I am all about the internet and making webpages and apps and the like so getting to read a bit about how everything behind the scenes went down before the site was created and then trying to figure out how to balance its popularity as well as know what to censor and what not to censor was really interesting to me. A lot of fun stories from behind the scenes, some sad ones as well. I learned a lot, even if it did seem to take me forever and a day to actually end up finishing the book. (Where has all my free time gone!? No wonder why I have no time for reddit...)

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

As a long-time fan and user of Reddit, when I saw this book on NetGalley I couldn’t hit the request button fast enough. And I was pumped when I get the email saying I had been approved. And while non-fiction isn’t edge-of-your-seat kind of stuff that you find in the fiction world, it was a whole other level of interesting.

Fascinating is probably a better word. When it comes to companies and businesses we’re familiar with, we have notions in our head (maybe even on a subconscious level) and what the day-to-day is like or how it got started. Until you learn the truth, and that all your notions were 100% wrong.

One of the most interesting things I noticed, was how similar everything seemed to the television show Silicon Valley. The show is about tech valley and the constant ‘start-ups’ that come from it. I guess that’s a feather in cap for that show and its authenticity.

Living in California and being involved in these start-ups means you can be the CEO of a brand new company this week, and out on your ass without a penny to your name next week. And in that situation, it’s not even a big deal because companies are beginning and ending all the time. Hundreds per day, from the sound of it. If your goes under, you’ll be in on another one soon enough.

What I liked best was all the little trivial tidbits I’ve taken away from this book, and hope to keep with me for a long time.

The only things I didn’t enjoy about this book were pace and names. The pace was slow, but then again this is non-fiction we’re talking about. I haven’t read a lot of non-fiction, so the pace might be right where it should be and I just don’t realize it.

And the names that were dropped in this book was just too much. Some people were introduced as though they may be an important player in the events to come, so I’m struggling to remember his name among a sea of others, and then he’s gone less than a chapter later.

It’s a great book for anyone who enjoys Reddit. And if you’ve been using the site for some time, you’ll remember some of the changes and events they go into detail about. I hadn’t thought much about them at the time. Things change all the time. I never thought to wonder ‘why?’ The next bit of change to come along will probably get a different reaction from me.

I love stories of tech startups. There's something so compelling about the genius and somewhat naive optimism of the founders. Scenes of them coding in humble basements, apartments, and garages are as exciting as suspense movies to me. (The system has been breached! Abort! Abort!)

Reddit's birth has surprisingly less drama than I would have thought, though it does have its fair share. I believe being part of Y Combinator, a tech startup fund that nurtures and guides its recipients, helped them find their way more smoothly. Unfortunately, the pratfalls seem to have mostly come after they were acquired.

Lagorio-Chafkin follows a few tributaries that flow away from the story, such as Swartz's night as a homeless tourist. It's hard to fault those streams of consciousness to nowhere, though, because they add such interesting color to the story.

Good book about an insanely addictive platform. It makes me want to take a scroll through Reddit right now, in fact.

This is the story of what goes on behind the front page of the internet and how it got to where it is now. It is mainly split up into how the site got created and who worked on it, occasional high/low points in the sites content including with how it dealt with it's seedy porn underbelly and its more recent problems with white supremacists.

It was interesting to me to think of this wildly successful site that was growing a user base at amazing rates, and learning that behind the scenes they were struggling for cash and couldn't get anyone hired.

Would recommend this book to people who are interested in tech startups, or are redditors who are interested in the history of the site they use.