• thesmokingman@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Gramba@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        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…

    • Tmiwi@lemmy.world
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      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.