this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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…

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i heard that Ohanian and Huffman have people out there trying to suggest that he was a pedo or some shit, what about that

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd say you can read Aaron's own defense of child porn on his website and draw your own conclusions. If you're trying to suggest that I'm somehow defending Ohanian and Huffman, far from it. I can think Swartz shouldn't be considered a modern folk hero and still not like the other two.

Huffman was a mod for the jailbait subreddit.

Here's an interview with Ohanian after CNN reported on the jailbait subreddit which caused Reddit to close it down. Alexis blames CNN for "making up jibber jabber" and the children who allowed images of their abuse to be posted online.

This type of view was apparently support by all the original Reddit folks, just because Swartz has a better reputation now doesn't mean he didn't also share those views.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

He was 16 years old when he posted this. The statement is disgusting and not really defensable by itself, but I wonder if this was a dumb naive teenage take, or if he still thought this way up until he died.

I also don't know if he was actually a pedophile, or if he just thought freedom of information on the web should be taken to the extreme. I would lean towards the latter since he seemed to have a relationship with an older woman at some point, but I don't think I will ever truly know for sure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That archive date I linked is from shortly after his death. If you go through the various archive dates you can see that he made changes to the page over the years. He added the bit about wanting a violent overthrow of the government when he was 18 or 19. In 2007 when he would have been 21, the archive just shows a note that he had a server crash and the site is gone but you can email him if you want a copy of it. By the time he was 22 he'd put the site back online. He made more edits visible through the following years until his death. So yeah we don't know his thoughts but we do he continued to maintain that page, even choosing to restore it after a server crash, until the point he killed himself. It's not as though it's an online post he made as a kid and forgot about.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The statement is disgusting and not really defensable by itself

I hate it when this happens. Why do feelings always play into this discussion? "The statement is disgusting", is not an argument, and should never be part of any discussion.

No matter how disgusted a statement might make you feel, if it has a good argument behind it, it should be regarded as true.

I agree that the argument doesn't quite work. And that's that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I just meant that it makes me feel gross. I imagine many people feel the same. I guess the statement itself isn't disgusting, but what it is advocating for is. On the other hand,

the argument doesn't quite work.

is putting it a bit lightly, in my opinion. Mostly because pedophilia is a generally despised act that should probably not really be argued for in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't that a bit of a conflict to think violence against the government is good because there are pedos in the government and also that Aaron should be a hero for not being afraid to share his thoughts of defending pedos?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

He's not defending pedophiles he's making a point against the law you stupid idiot. The guy was arrested and faced life imprisonment over something that shouldn't have been a crime to begin with

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The feds did come after him for other computer crimes (unrelated to those views) and he hung himself and investigation into him stopped at that point.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Eh, didn't know the full story behind him (or even that he hung himself for that matter).

I'm not gonna pretend to have sympathy for him if he was guilty of possessing the stuff that he was advocating for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But you have no problem creating judgement about the guy without knowing anything about him.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I read what he posted on his website. I know enough to make that judgement. I know me AND you would have said the exact same thing about everyone else that posted that shit on their website.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No, you and I are different. I read what a 16 year old kid wrote AND I read the article that he linked to that explains why he was saying what he said.

You are basing your entire view of an adult based on what they wrote as a kid, without reading further to see why they had that opinion at the time. And you're completely fine judging them that way.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He was a big fan of freedom of speech of all kinds. That doesn't in any way suggest he possessed child porn. Read the entire page and it becomes quite clear that he is literally just listing laws that make certain kinds of data illegal.

I strongly disagree that CSAM should be legal, but the point that honest people have their lives ruined by being accused of possessing it, or by having normal images of their children, is certainly true.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

If you defend that shit in ANY way I'm gonna raise some eyebrows way up.

I do not care if it's to defend "free speech", there's WAY better ways to be an advocate for "any" free speech that don't include advocating for murder, hate speech or in this case CP.

"Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.", sure buddy.

"Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won't make the abuse go away.", yeah the typical "stricter gun laws won't make mass shootings go away" excuse. Of course, but legalizing it would only make it way worse.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

"Early the next year, he published a blog post that some took to be a suicide note, which scared his cofounders enough that Alexis called the police"

Maybe try reading your source before citing it?

Any code from that era of the internet could most likely be called shit... Shit code has levels. Steve and Alex struggled to have even functional code... Aaron's code wasn't the Mona Lisa, he hardly considered himself a programmer, but it was functional.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I really love it when you do that to me

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This disgusts me.

Aaron Is one of my heroes. He died standing up for something he believed in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.