As BuzzFeed grew, its understanding of what people liked—and, more to the point, what they liked to share with friends—became increasingly fine-tuned. “We start[ed] to get a sense,” Peretti would later explain, “of where’s the beating heart of the internet.” For most of its existence, the web was hailed as the ultimate information repository, a reservoir that contained and catalogued the sum total of human knowledge. Peretti, by contrast, saw it as the aggregate of human emotion, a living and breathing thing more sentimental than rational.
