got hooked on traffic, unleashing forces it could not control. Smith works hard to convince us that animosity grew between Peretti and Denton as the competition for traffic between their two companies intensified, but the evidence for this atavistic feud amounts to little more than a handful of tame tweets: In March 2010, for example, Denton called Peretti “a bit of a dick,” and Peretti replied, “I’m a dick to u bc of social mirroring. But the limp introspection of these postmortems jars with the excitability of the passages where he recounts BuzzFeed’s explosive growth (“The traffic was back”; “I went to stand in the middle of the newsroom and watch the traffic flow”; “I loved the traffic”), suggesting a basic conflict that the book leaves unresolved