9781422277300

Introduction: A President Goes Online

just tell me,” Villanueva wrote in an Ask Me Anything post in June 2012. A few weeks before, he said, doctors told him a rare form of cancer was attacking his kidneys. “I have been on chemo, which is no longer working and the cancer continues to spread,” he wrote. “This one doesn’t have a survival rate . . . it is likely that I will not see my 24th birthday.” People were so touched by his confession and courage, that by the time he went to bed, Villanueva’s thread—a chain of posts and comments—jumped to the top of the site. In his post, Villan- ueva mentioned in passing how he had wanted to take a vacation with his family. That comment caught the eye of Redditor Lindsay Minor, who started an online fundraising campaign. Money poured in, allowing Villanueva to travel from his home in British Columbia, Canada, to six American cities, including Chicago and New York. Villanueva died in 2013. Since then, Reddit has morphed into one of the most pop- ular websites. That’s not exactly what a couple of college kids, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, envisioned when they creat- ed the site in 2005. All they wanted to do was order lunch.

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