We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

What he wasn’t considering at the moment was that if this community of individuals could use their collective power for massive good, they could also commit terrible ills.

Member when we memed a man into the White House?

(Huffman had found his own media-friendly way of describing to the world what does Alexis do? He said, “I made Reddit. Alexis made Reddit cool.”)

More than a million individuals had placed 16.5 million colored tiles on pixels, creating a garish masterpiece of Internet culture. Wardle’s experiment had tapped into something incredible that Reddit, as a mass of individuals, loosely connected through common interests, could accomplish. In the end the canvas mirrored the project’s own fruit-fly-duration life. It was fractured and weird, and really, really cool.

Beaudette said that over time, T_D became not only one of the most extreme examples of subculture development on a forum he’d ever witnessed, but also one of the most highly organized.

Before long, Huffman opened up a feature that let anyone create any subreddit—though that URL was hidden at first and therefore rarely used. It was another step toward giving the masses power over what they chose to see online—regular people rather than editors—and that decision steered the course for the company’s future more than they ever could have foreseen at the time.

Look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck.

It was now widely known that women comprised just 6 percent of venture capitalists; women and minorities were sorely underrepresented throughout all levels of the broader tech industry.

minimum viable product.” He said, “The sooner you get it out there, users can start telling you what they want instead of you guessing. If you sit down and think of the perfect implementation, the problem is you’re thinking of the perfect implementation of the wrong thing.

From the moment he had told Ohanian back in the auditorium that they should go up and talk to Graham, he meant—and Ohanian understood—we go up and you talk to Graham.

The design team couldn’t risk pissing off old users. In designer speak, this is called “preserving the spirit,” and as Rush explained, when it came to Reddit, it mandated that the designers not touch the comment structure or left-hand-side voting. Some of the spirit of Reddit was tied to its cluttered pages and its distinctly undesigned aesthetic.

One of the major problems with comments online—on news sites, blogs, and social media alike—was that they displayed chronologically, allowing trolls and spammers an equal voice to informed critics and enthusiasts. “To me, that’s the dumbest thing ever,” Huffman said. With his approach of letting users’ votes power the ranking of comments, and simply not displaying the most downvoted ones, Reddit deftly hid dull, promotional, harassing, or simply idiotic comments (all of which Huffman simply called “shitty comments”).