Reddit @lemmy.world

1y ago

Aaron is no longer considered as cofounder by reddit. He fought for free speech.

257 comments

Fuck Spez
- I really love it when you do that to me

Swartz wasn’t involved in the origins of Reddit. He got involved when Y Combinator combined his company with Reddit (something along those lines?). He was not an actual founder, just an early influencer. In many ways, decoupling him from the shitshow that Ohanian and Huffman have engendered is a good thing.
This is very similar to the argument of Musk being a founder of Tesla.
- Also Swartz had a section of his homepage defending child pornography as "not necessarily abuse" and that possession & distribution of it should be a first amendment right. He also advocated for a violent overthrow of the US government. Here's a cache of one instance of him defending it. Aaron did some really great tech stuff, but he's not a person that should be regarded as some hero as he had a lot of views that were misguided at best.
  
  In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.
  This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won't make the abuse go away. We don't arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.
  I don't know if that's the reason CP is actually banned, but his logic is even worse and dumber by a mile.
  
  That website has been the same since it’s first archive on 2002-12-17. Aaron Swartz had just turned 16 a month earlier. I know I had some seriously immature opinions at that age. As well, that website was still up as of this January, a decade since his passing. http://www.aaronsw.com/ is also still up, and it doesn’t look like it was updated since 2002 either. Neither is any of this referenced on his wikipedia page, nor on it’s talk page. This feels like such a reach…
  
  I sure love it when people use a single opinion to smear a person's entire legacy, he was great not only for the tech stuff but his stance on scientific articles piracy and a lot of other stuff too.
  I won't say that that his opinion on cp is a great one (there is no doubt at least for me that distribution should always be illegal), but he wrote it as a 16 years old and it was guided due to his extremism for free speech over the internet, regardless, it's not like he himself was an evil person distributing child pornography, to paint him as an overall shitty person for an opinion like this seems idiotic imo
  This is q bit personal and maybe slightly unrelated, but it reminds me of when people defend non-offending pedos (as in they are attracted to children because yhey are born that way but have not offended, nor groomed, nor harmed a child) saying the stigma should be erased because that would allow us to actually help this people who constantly hide it, therefore reducing the harm to children. This position has unironically got me called a pedophile and a lot of horrible stuff over the internet, and I would draw parallels to this situation, no matter how you slice it this opinion should not be used singlehandedly to state he is someone that shouldn't be respected. Especially since he is not defending the harm itself being done to children (as in the production of CP) which would still be a crime under his view. (Although distribution of course grows the market so it's idiotic not to go after that too), but as I said, it's a bad opinion but that doesn't make him a bad person.
  
  FYI your link is broken and is just leading to the archive home page
  
  Your link isn’t working for me
  
  Dont Link to Us is like saying, "Dont Mention us on your coffee shop's Bulliton board", is that why redditors call "Starbucks" things like "That one coffee shop with the green logo"
  
  i heard that Ohanian and Huffman have people out there trying to suggest that he was a pedo or some shit, what about that
  
  Oh...oh no
  
  What. The actual. Fuck. This guy is comparing peas to pies.
  Imagine wanting to legalize that shit because "We don't arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.". Can't he imagine what would happen if we legalized that shit?
  I think someone needs to get their hard drives examined.
  
  He also advocated for a violent overthrow of the US government.
  Half of the US goverment are pedos, under your own logic he advocated for something good.
  he’s not a person that should be regarded as some hero
  With the amount of scum and corruption around these days any public figure not afraid to share their own thoughts should indeed be regarded as an hero
- It's why all the appeals to "what would Aaron think" with the whole API thing were really off the mark.
  spez and kn0thing were college buddies. Swartz was kind of pushed onto them by YC. I've never had the impression that they felt any particular attachment to him; he was a business partner that became involved at the behest of the people funding them, who left in the first couple of years.
  
  He's also listed right at the top of the page, in the screenshot where people are complaining about him not being listed. He doesn't get a snoo caricature, but this seems like a not totally unreasonable (if literally comicly simplified) representation of a complex and fairly contentious founding relationship that DOES show Swartz' involvement as one of the 3 founders.
- Why say something that is wrong, and easily can be checked? This wasn't company A acquired company B. This is company A and B merged to form company C, "Not a bug" to which Aaron Swartz became partial owner of and founding partner of.
  Also, saying Aaron was only an influencer (seriously, what is that?) is also very incorrect, Aaron basically refactored all their shit code and made reddit functional.
  
  Reddit was Steve and Alex who merged with infogami. By your argument SPACs are completely new companies and pull founders from both. Reddit was originally written in LISP and rewritten with Aaron. The code was still shit (and still is shit).
  Why say something that is wrong that can easily be checked?
  
  Which makes him a founder of "Not a bug", not reddit.

This disgusts me.
Aaron Is one of my heroes. He died standing up for something he believed in.
- Imagine if we got him to join Lemmy's side
  Edit: oh shit I didn't know it, RIP
  
  You can’t. Aaron is dead. He killed himself while he being blindsided by the courts for downloading journals and educational materials that were being kept behind paid walls.
  
  The dude said died
  
  He would have thought the entire fediverse thing was fantastic.
- I believe that Aaron stood up and didn't grab ankle when confronted with overwhelming force sent from his intellectual and moral inferiors.
  But being short on days to make eternity just we all have a crumple point. And the government's executive branches have found crumpling to be so very easy to do.
- Yeah, but he also believed that child porn should be legal to distribute, so can't say he's my hero even though I respect a lot of his other views.
- His name and a photo of him are right there on that page as a founder though.
  You're disgusted because someone didn't draw him as a cartoon?
  
  Top half is a google search, the bottom is the Reddit website. Notice how the official website says "created by two friends."
  
  This is an example of revisionist history on the part of the 'founders' of reddit.

As a silver lining maybe it's best people don't associate him with what the site has become. He was a piece of its history, but he wasn't trying to found what Reddit has become
- Yes. I think Aaron would want to take his name off from there.
  
  If I were him, I would be more concerned with my name being attached to this defense of child pornography: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/

That's a new low. Anyone who knows about Aaron and still using reddit - Shame on You.
- I use reddit but most of my comments are about lemmy
  
  People may criticize, but someone should advocate for this place, so the ones still there know where to go.
  
  I don't participate in any threads I just read nosleep lol
  Actually I don't read any threads other than bestofredditorupdates because I don't trust the fodder of people that stuck around either!
  
  Every time I did that I got downvoted to oblivion

Aaron was reddit, and since his passing its shit now.
RIP Mr Swartz, you are sorely missed.
- I need a history lesson. Who is Aaron, what's his deal?
  
  Honored to teach you about Aaron Swartz,
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
  He was the best of us and the jack boots murdered him. Free flow of ideas and knowledge, we cant have that. And reddit went to shit after... Again he was a poet warrior, I wish he was still here.
  
  Watch the documentary The Internet's Own Boy. It's very much worth the watch.
  
  One of the cofounders of Reddit. Killed himself. Here's his wiki. Aaron Swartz
  
  He invented RSS. He co-founded Reddit. However, JSTOR and MIT had him charged with felony computer crimes for downloading too many JSTOR articles he had a subscription for. Instead of serving time he killed himself.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

Really fucking blessed memory. He was one of the real ones. I'll never forget what Aaron did.
https://karolina.andersdotter.cc/2023/01/in-memoriam-aaron-swartz-1986-2013/
- I can't believe it's been ten fucking years already.

They just decided that because Aaron fought for free speech, this fact doesn't fit their agenda anymore so they removed it. Amazing.
- I think Aaron would be proud of what people is doing with the Fediverse as Lemmy or Kbin. Without a protocol and decentralization we would not have free speech.
- This permanently sealed the deal for me. I will never use Reddit as anything other than a search engine operator for finding niche information. Of all the unethical and sociopathic decisions that have been made over the years, this one I can never forgive. Steve Huffman is a cancer, and if he had any ounce of humanity left in him he would be ashamed of himself for allowing this.

Obligatory FUCK SPEZ.
He's a cunt.

Back when "reddit.com" was a subreddit. I remember the thread (you can still visit it today) regarding his early departure. And how Aaron and spez didn't really want to disclose the "real reason". But, it saddens me how the public viewed his contributions as complete nil in result of no full disclosure (Aaron did simply state corporate life (post acq.) was not for him, but everyone says that).
Especially during times like this when the same batch of Aaron's year (Altman, Huffman, etc) are pushing closed source thoughts. We need Open Access civics, like Aaron again.
- Guys like Aaron will always be forced out by guys like Steve because guys like Aaron don't want to be assholes, which is a necessity guys like Steve have no issue with.
  
  It’s not a surprise that the c-suite has the highest number of psychopaths.

I looked into this more. Reddit (created by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) merged with Infogami (created by Aaron Schwartz). There are people calling Aaron Schwartz one of the founders, but that doesn't seem entirely accurate.
- From Aaron Swartz's wiki page
  In the early fall of 2005, he worked with his fellow co-founders of another nascent Y-Combinator firm, Reddit, to rewrite its Lisp codebase using Python and web.py.
  This is more than just "merging his company into Reddit".
  
  Yeah, rewriting the entire project in a different language is a huge undertaking.
  
  yeah thats working for a company but not founding it
- Just because one outside source merges with another, doesn't mean you're a founder of the source that you've absorbed to. That'd be like saying Microsoft and Apple merged, so Steve Jobs is a founder of Microsoft. It doesn't work like that. He'd still be considered a founder of Apple.
  
  That’s not the best analogy. A better one would be Tesla, which started in 2001, incorporated in 2003, but didn’t meet Elon Musk until 2004. He’s listed as a co-founder. https://www.tesla.com/elon-musk
- Yeah, I have noticed this too. Nobody really ever mentioned him as a founder of reddit before a few years ago, and now it’s like some legend of internet lore. He was famous for different things and never called a founder of reddit from what I recall.

They really are doing their best to look like shitheads, aren’t they.

That dude was great, he helped contribute to RSS as well. RIP
- And Creative Commons. And SOPA. And WIkiLeaks. He was an Open Access civil servant in its true form.

It's old news, they removed him from the founders list two years ago.

This is true but also old news from what I remember they took him off that page a long time ago. Reddit has been heading toward it’s inevitable demise ever since Aaron passed. Glad I finally left for good.
- Wait. Back up.
  I haven't been embroiled in the drama that is Reddit and it's founding.... But the "c-level" guy that was basically the free speech advocate of the admin team.... Died?
  This explains a lot actually.
  
  He hung himself after being prosecuted by the federal authorities for academic journal article piracy. He was trying to make journal articles available to the masses and was facing life in prison for it. This was many years ago.
  
  he died in 2013. his involvement with reddit ended officially in 2007, but even by his own admission he stopped any involvement with the company when it was acquired by conde nast - he was part of reddit for less than a year.
  his death really doesn't have anything to do with reddit's current trajectory
  
  Yeah he was arrested for downloading a massive amount of documents/articles off JSTOR with a computer hidden in an on-campus closet. He ended up committing suicide before going to trial for it

At the End of the day: The greedy man's gonna have nothing, literally nothing. For Aaron his legacy will continue.
- We can hope, but if Facebook adn Microsoft taught us anything, is that the greedy man will keep fuckloads of cash
  
  Fuck loads of cash but nothing to show for it.
  
  They'll get theirs eventually, imho. Maybe not this go around, but it'll happen. Always does.

Fuck spez.

u/spez is a complete and utter piece of shit

Ok. Now that is truly fucked up. Someone needs to check in on that fucker, he's not mentally healthy.

Ironically he is defeated by being censored out. :(

It should have been spez
- Please God, give us Aaron Schwartz back and take Spez. Thanks!

Yesterday, I finally decided to cut ties with reddit, except for targeted web searches. First it was the constant attempts to force me to download their app. Then denying me access to certain posts and subreddits cuz I wouldn't. Then the API debacle. Then few days ago, significant redesign that wasn't for usability, but for money,. Corporate greed. Used to spend hours on reddit, but past few weeks, there's hardly any worthwhile content. One has to be careful what one gets used to. Grateful I discovered lemmy yesterday.
- I occasionally open RiF (logged out) and get to see the current "front page" that for everyone (no longer catered to me), and with all the subreddits that have stayed private, been banned, etc. all sorts of weird posts are surfacing to the top for everyone.
  First of all, I see tons of subreddits I have no interest in, all about judgment of OP's looks (/r/amiugly, /r/truerateme, /r/firstimpressions, /r/roastme, etc.), and I keep seeing /r/weddingdress posts trying to help people pick their wedding dress from multiple options. Such a hodge podge of disjointed and niche posts that certainly doesn't feel like the broad "front page of the internet" anymore.
  
  Oooh same. I just opened RiF the other day, and the front page is ..... yikes. Mostly the drama subs are trending and making it to front page - and almost all of them are ragebait fiction a la AITA, and most of the crowd seems to be teens? The teens are the majority.
  It also seems the alternate subs are trending more - r/ask for r/askreddit, something called TwoHotTakes is trending more than UnpopularOpinion?
  r/all is slightly better but still a crapfest lol
- Wait, they redesigned it again?

Fuck spez... But where is Alexis on all of this? Does he comment, or just cashes the checks now?

After reading the comments, Reddit admin stuff always sounded like it was a shitshow of controvertial, troubled or outright evil people.
- Precisely why I left

Fuck Spez

That's a painfully sad deletion. Aaron fought the good fight. It makes me sad how he came to an end.

No credits to Aaron? Shame for them!

I mean this is somewhat accurate
- Swartz founded Infogami, which merged with reddit when they were both early stage incubator startups. In a sense, he became a founder of Not A Bug (which became the parent company of both Infogami and Reddit), but Reddit the subsidiary and project and website predates his involvement. And Reddit, the project, was a big reason why Not A Bug was acquired by Conde Nast in 2006.
  He provided big early contributions (migrating the code base from lisp to python was a significant project), but wasn't really a founder, and didn't really contribute much after that first year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit

Steve Farthufferman

Funny, Alexis bounced out a few years ago over flimsy reasons. I think he saw the writing on the wall.

You can't consider a cofounder to no longer be one. Unless you travel back in time to change history.
- aaronsw was not involved in the creation of reddit. When his company was acquired by reddit, he was granted a "cofounder" title as part of the deal.
  while it's a dick move to erase him, "you can't change history" is a poor argument when the only reason he's considered a cofounder in the first place is because history was changed.
  
  Yeah, I got downvoted to -25 for pointing this out on a Lemmy recently. He was in early enough to be considered a cofounder, and did a ton of work on it before anyone had really heard of reddit (rewriting their lisp codebase to Python around 2006) but he wasn't one of the two people who actually started it. So... the pic in this post is accurate, and it's kind of funny how it says "not considered a cofounder!" and the pic literally has him listed as 'founder'.
- You can consider anyone to be anything. Consideration doesn't have to be based in reality.
- Musk considers himself a founder of Tesla.
  Anything is possible if you're a cunt.
  
  When Musk bought "Tesla" it was two guys and an idea. It's bigger now.
- Or you just rewrite it. Control the past and you will control the future

It’s been like this for years but now Aaron has a good reason to not want to be associated with it.
- You make it sound like he's still alive.
  
  Ow, sorry. OOTL

I learned about Aaron in college in a communication class when we talked about the open access and open source movements. I didn't know he had anything to do with Reddit or Internet Archive until years later. Reddit's vision lately seems really backward from what Swartz wanted. How was he ever friends with Steve Huffman? Was Huffman always such an insensitive tyrant or did he only become so since becoming CEO? Even Ohanian. What did he see in Huffman? I've admired Ohanian for his advocacy on mental health, parental leave, and racial equality. Huffman seems to only care about himself. It's just hard for me to imagine a time where thoughtful people like Swartz or Ohanian would have the time of day for someone like Huffman. Of course, I'm not sure how much Ohanian works on Reddit lately, but it's a shame he's allowed these draconian changes to happen through Huffman and his cronies.

Nobody cares about u/spez !

WTF???

RIP Aaron

Man, that is really upsetting. I truly hope Aaron found peace. זכרונו לברכה

I don't even know to say to this.

@SineFineBelli WTF???

Ah I see, fuck speX is using the old muskAROO tactics to claim somebody else works as he's own. What a pathetic simulation we are in lmao
- It’s actually the opposite. People are trying to posthumously Musk Swartz.
  Reddit was absolutely originally founded by Ohianian and Huffman. Swartz joined later because he was also working with Y Combinator, and Paul Graham suggested they merge to consolidate things. So Swartz joined reddit 1-2 years in. He did do a ton for them - as a talented Python programmer and author of early framework web.py, he saved them from their Lisp code base by rewriting it in Python.
  Very early employees/co-owners can be considered founders, but he did not literally found reddit. He was a pretty fact-based and fair person and I don’t think he would be super happy that people are fighting this non-factual fight for him.
  Not to mention, this post title is fairly insane since he is specifically listed as “Founder” in the pic. But he wasn’t one of the two people who actually started reddit in the first place, so the lower portion is accurate too.

have college friends too. idiots
- Lol what?

Aaron was no hero.
- How so? Educate us!
  
  The CSA ...
- how does spez's dick taste like?
  
  How's mine taste?

257 comments