This is a book review I wrote back in 2018. I’m reprinting reviews of books that I really enjoyed and want to highlight. Since I read this book, I’ve gotten well acquainted with Reddit and find it a fascinating and useful place to visit.
Basic Premise
The history of the website Reddit — from its founding to the present day.
Short Plot Synopsis
This book tracks the founding of Reddit and follows its founders (Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) through the site’s infancy, troubled adolescence and (hopefully) long adult life.
The Good
- I had never visited Reddit before reading this book (in fact, I didn’t fully understand what Reddit was exactly), yet I was completely interested the entire time I was reading this book. I think that’s always a good sign, don’t you?
- The book is easy to read and you get invested in learning about the people involved in making Reddit and in the site’s continued life. The fact that Reddit was involved in so many different cultural “zeitgeist” moments makes it feel fresh and relevant. You’ll realize that you knew more about Reddit than you thought.
- As I mentioned before, you don’t have to have any interest or experience with Reddit to enjoy this book. It isn’t overly technical, but I do think it presents an inside view of what goes into the making of sites like these: the hours of time, the accidental nature of how a decision made on the fly can have ramifications down the road, how interconnected tech companies are. (It seems like every friend of Huffman and Ohanian founded another website that is in regular use today.) The book also presents a lot of food for thought about what constitutes free speech and how much it needs to be protected. Due to Reddit’s freeform “open” nature, it led it to become a breeding ground for some pretty controversial and ugly subreddits. It makes you think about the struggle that the site faces and continues to face: how much should it let these groups flourish? For this reason, I think this book is about a lot more than the story of Reddit. It becomes a book about freedom of speech and where the limits of that freedom should be.
The Bad
- Some pretty nasty groups found a home and a voice on Reddit, and the books covers many of these controversial groups and discussions — getting into subject matter that some might find offensive. For this reason, I would recommend caution when reading the book. If you’re easily offended, you might find some of the subject matter in this book to be disturbing.
- I found that I just wanted more … more details, more follow-up on particular stories. I felt like the book could have been longer — but that is just because I became so engrossed in some of the stories and wanted to find out more. It wasn’t a failing of the author — she just had a lot of good material and had to tell the story she was telling and couldn’t go down every rabbit hole she found.
- You’ll find yourself wasting even more time online than you do now if you weren’t already familiar with Reddit. I found myself going onto the site to see what it was all about and spending way more time on it than I should have. It feels a bit addictive in a way.
- I would have loved to see some photos. (Note: I received an early review copy of the book via Amazon Vine so perhaps the finished book will include photos.) I found myself Googling many of the people mentioned in the book to find out more about them.
Final Thoughts
This was a fascinating read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was educational, informative and thought-provoking. I actually read this book because my husband wanted to read it but didn’t want to have to write a review of it so I agreed to read it. I’m so glad I did!
