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Somewhere on Reddit right now a stranger is fixing your Wi-Fi, a crowd is judging a family row, and someone is stapling bread to a tree. This book looks at all of it the way an anthropologist would look at a society, or rather a crowd of neighbouring ones that share a building and often can't stand each other: how the upvote shapes what gets said, why the joke so often beats the right answer, and how tiny forums grow their own constitutions, schisms and traditions, kept running by unpaid moderators.
Then it gets into the harder stuff, from pseudonymity and political certainty to communities that help and communities that harm, and the times Reddit spilled into the real world, like GameStop and the Boston Marathon bombing. It ends with the money, twenty years of conversation licensed to AI companies, and it's fair to both the site's fans and its critics. You don't need an account to enjoy it.
Somewhere on Reddit right now a stranger is fixing your Wi-Fi, a crowd is judging a family row, and someone is stapling bread to a tree. This book looks at all of it the way an anthropologist would look at a society, or rather a crowd of neighbouring ones that share a building and often can't stand each other: how the upvote shapes what gets said, why the joke so often beats the right answer, and how tiny forums grow their own constitutions, schisms and traditions, kept running by unpaid moderators.
Then it gets into the harder stuff, from pseudonymity and political certainty to communities that help and communities that harm, and the times Reddit spilled into the real world, like GameStop and the Boston Marathon bombing. It ends with the money, twenty years of conversation licensed to AI companies, and it's fair to both the site's fans and its critics. You don't need an account to enjoy it.