[earthscienceman]

This is a nice time to remind everyone that Aaron Swartz died while fighting for a freer internet and a freer world. He is, by Paul Graham, considered a founder of reddit but is rarely mentioned in these stories.

Instead of trying to go for broke and grind till he could cash out, Aaron put his skin in the game for what the internet should become. Which gets more relevant everyday that the internet megacorps consolidate power, control information, and shape the public discourse. Reddit is one such site. They should be embarrassed by how they dismissed the ethical dilemmas of operating reddit in favor of making a profit.

[kodah]

It'd be nice if they'd stop trying erase Aaron's work on Reddit but that's been underway for some time, and I'm not even really sure why. I can't fathom an end-goal where marginalizing Aaron's contributions is a benefit to them.

[benatkin]

Yeah it was long before the government went after Aaron. You could hear it straight from spez but the comment linked here is deleted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20241

[birken]

If I had to guess as to why his contributions are marginalized, it would be that his contributions were ~16 years ago to a version of the website that is vastly different in scope and scale to the one that exists today. Founders are important entities for companies, but just having the title of "founder" doesn't also magically mean whatever contributions and decisions you made have to be memorialized and defended forever after so many things have changed.

[benatkin]

Hmm. Tesla would be a bad analogy but what you said would apply to them as well. To give the founder of Tesla zero credit, as Elon does, seems wrong.

He wasn't really like Facebook's other founders either. (Unlike Elon and Tesla, Zuckerberg is unquestionably a founder of Facebook.) Zuckerberg gave them too little credit, but at least one of them demanded too much credit IMO. That doesn't make it right for Zuckerberg to give them too little credit.

[birken]

There is a very big difference between giving no credit and giving a fair amount of credit, which might be small. If you listened to the podcast they talked about Aaron in a non-disparaging way, and a way that I'm sure is accurate to their beliefs about it.

But my point is that _even if_ Aaron was super, super important to the company 16 years ago (which I can't speak to), Reddit was a tiny little fledgling of what it is now. From what little I know about Reddit's history, I know that Aaron stopped working on Reddit very soon after he started and has had no contribution to the company since then.

I also do think it's interesting that the people that have worked at Reddit for years/decades all seem to have a similar opinion of the situation, and the people who haven't worked at Reddit at all are the ones that feel so strongly that Aaron is being wronged somehow.

Maybe Aaron himself was more proud of all the other things he accomplished! Saying he was an important but small part of Reddit's story is still something!

[benatkin]

If people have to listen to a podcast to hear them present a balanced view, clearly they've failed to do so publicly.

I'll pass on listening to the podcast, there are thousands of others I'd rather listen to. Thanks anyways.

[jefftk]

> > If you listened to the podcast they talked...

> If people have to listen to a podcast to hear...

birken wasn't saying that this information is only in a podcast, he's talking about a podcast because that's the article we're discussing.

[birken]

Well I guess we'll both agree to disagree about the nuances of the early years of Reddit, something neither of us know anything about. Oh well.

[pbhjpbhj]

To my recollection Aaron Swartz was anti-establishment; the reddit he was part of was grass-roots, laissez-faire, no holds barred, ... whilst reddit today is part of the media establishment, much more top-down, heavily modded and censored.

Reddit in the post digg-exodus days seemed like a veneer of 'news' covering one of _the_ seedy underbellies of the web. Not only, but to a large extent a hive of scum and villainy; not a chan-site but similarly lacking in societal respectability.

?

[benatkin]

He was only there for a few months, so I don't think the reddit community changed much and drove him off that way. It was like it was when it started for several years.

kn0thing and spez seem like they have a lot in common with Elon politically. Aaronsw not so much.

Sorry I can't seem to explain how I perceive their political differences at the moment and instead am just giving an example.

[theGnuMe]

Libertarian?

[benatkin]

Who?

Aaronsw definitely not IMO.

He cofounded this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress

[theGnuMe]

Elon is the libertarian in this analogy.

[faeriechangling]

I've felt for a decade now, even though the two weren't directly linked, that the death of Aaron Schwartz was the symbolic death of Reddit's soul. Nowadays the website is a dark pattern hellscape that forces app downloads for "age verification" and just because you scrolled through too many comments.

Schwartz is dead and Ohanian is a multi-millionaire married to an olympian, so I guess that tells you about what society values. At least we can already see the beginning of the end of the exploitative paywalled journals and people like Alexandra Elbakyan picking up where Schwartz left off.

[jacquesm]

Swartz.

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

[faeriechangling]

I must be watching too much Spaceballs

[jacquesm]

Np, it's an easy thing to get wrong. I'm just trying to stop propagation of the wrong information.

[iguana_lawyer]

I’ve been banned from multiple subreddits for commenting “I wish Aaron Swartz were still alive”. Just that. Nothing else. Instant ban with no recourse. That’s how toxic reddit moderators are.

[nelsonenzo]

It's owned by a Chinese company from what I understand. I don't think they have a particular bone with Aaron, but generally just believe in deleting inconvenient controversies.

[eco]

Tencent owns 5% of reddit.

[nelsonenzo]

5% based on fictional evaluation, but $150 of the last $300 mil raised. Certainly enough to influence marketing and positioning.

[bink]

IIRC they don't even have a seat on the board.

[dangus]

Well, that's what sort of happened.

He broke in to an MIT networking closet (he was never a student there, and MIT is not a public university) and connected his equipment to the network.

https://www.wired.com/2013/12/swartz-video/

There are a lot of much more legal ways to make the Internet freer. He was a smart guy and knew what he was doing was highly illegal. It goes without saying that it's very tragic that he decided to end his life.

I think that this is the major issue with martyrdom. Aaron is remembered for "fighting the man" but the real story is a significantly muddier than that. A martyr's death makes it seem like the martyr did nothing wrong even if they did, so tread carefully on idolizing them. (You and I certainly wouldn't appreciate a stranger breaking into our homelab closets and attaching equipment, and in many states we would be within our rights to defend our property with deadly force on sight).

People like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman make the Internet and computing more free while avoiding blatant, stupid lawbreaking. Aaron sadly isn't around to make the successor to Reddit or do anything to help make the Internet more free.

I'm not trying to say that the feds being intimidating is right, but, ya know, Aaron did the exact sort of thing that goes far beyond petty crime.

Sorry, I know this is kind of a dumb and not so productive soap box. Oh well.

[maister]

> He broke in to an MIT networking closet (he was never a student there) and connected his equipment to the network.

The closet was unlocked and he used a regular guest access to the MIT network. Also he was downloading documents that were created by using public funds.

> There are a lot of much more legal ways to make the Internet freer. He was a smart guy and knew what he was doing was highly illegal.

There are always other and more effective ways to everything. With this kind of argumentation one always must come to the conclusion that it is best to do nothing. Also let's not forget that he did much more than downloading documents at MIT.

> think that this is the major issue with martyrdom. Aaron is remembered for "fighting the man" but the real story is a significantly muddier than that. A martyr's death makes it seem like the martyr did nothing wrong even if they did.

That's a definition for martyrdom I have not heard before. Usually a martyr is simply defined as a person who is willing to suffer or even die for a cause, belief, or principle that they consider to be of great importance.

> Sorry, I know this is kind of a dumb and not so productive soap box. Oh well.

I will simply never understand why people will argument so strongly against their self interests.

[dangus]

I’m not really talking about the definition of martyrdom, I’m talking about the effects of martyrdom on the general public.

E.g., what would Christianity become had Jesus not died on the cross? The central motivation of the Christian faith is that Christ died for our sins. It wouldn’t be so impactful if Jesus died of old age like everyone else.

I’m basically saying that being a martyr is something that amplifies a person’s image, and that’s the reason why Aaron came up in the first place.

If he took the six month plea deal and was alive today, he would not be part of this discussion.

[nullc]

I'd agree that people aren't invoking him because they care about him personally, people seldom give a darn when someone else isn't being given full credit. But I think it doesn't have anything to do with martyrdom: People were complaining about the reddit thing wrt Aaron while he was alive too.

The comments are driven out of concern and feelings of loss related to reddit's former perceived public-spirited democratic spirit in favor of corporate interests. It's only natural that people would highlight an early participant who seemed more aligned with their perspective and who seems to have been diminished in the modern narrative.

Does Aaron's separation with reddit explain its cultural changes? Things are seldom that simple. But when talking on a forum about our concerns with how reddit has changed over the years a simple view is perfectly appropriate-- so for some people bringing up the missing co-founder, is a suitable way to express their views.

[dangus]

Perhaps you’re right…which brings up another point: all these people building idealist products need to stop selling out to investors and acquiring companies.

The recent news about Imgur violating its original purpose of being the anti-photobucket image host for Reddit is the same thing, and even worse: Imgur was bootstrapped.

A founder can’t be said to have an idealist perspective if they sell their idealist platform to the highest bidder.

Jack Dorsey also comes to mind.

[nullc]

hah. For Dorsey the point that happened was when he made it public, I believe he's said he regretted that! :)

But I think the invocation of imgur brings up a good point. Was what we believed imgur to be ever actually economically viable? They were "bootstrapped" but $40 million in 2013, back before almost all of their impact.

At least some of the funded things that 'sell out' were just never viable to begin with.

It's far from clear to me that reddit couldn't have become more like Wikipedia-- driven by its community and funded through public support-- but there are lots of things that we could decry for violating their purpose that I think couldn't exist economically in their original more public-spirited form.

I find myself wondering more how often alternatives that are viable but just a little less good are driven out of the market or prevented from ever being created by funded alternatives which aren't viable... leaving us stuck on a bait and switch tread-mill while the services we actually need die for lack of support.

[nullc]

I think your comment manages to be both uncharitable and misleading. Until very recently the MIT campus was extremely open and accessible to everyone. A great many non-mit students have many experiences going places far more dubious, including steam tunnels and machine rooms deep under the buildings. Can you tell me how many of them have been _federally prosecuted_? Can you name even one? If you could then perhaps we can have a good faith discussion about "highly illegal" and "far beyond petty crime".

Even after the new lockdowns ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352567 ) the building in question is one of the ones still open to the general public. Tossing your equipment into an equipment closet, to access the exact same network you can access elsewhere but with reduced risk of some vagrant walking off with it is the same thing most people would do if they needed to leave some equipment connected and didn't have access to a more secure location.

There is just no way to deny that what Aaron was being prosecuted for was 'downloading too many scientific papers while having an anti-monopolist mindset'. Any mere urban explorer who arguably trespassed into a school facility would at most be facing a local trespassing charge, and in a case like this where the facility was expressly open to the general public and their unauthorized access was to an unlocked wiring closet, those charges likely wouldn't have stuck (or wouldn't have resulted in a very consequential sentence). Usually trespassers, when caught, are just kicked out and not charged at all. Exactly the sort of "petty crime" not-"highly-illegal" stuff you argue it wasn't.

Is it unfortunate that the feds had an option to cloak their almost nakedly political prosecution behind a complaint of dubious deeds? Wouldn't it have been better (for him) if he'd asked one of his many friends that had offices at MIT if he could leave a computer in their office? Sure. But we don't get to pick the cases that are used to defend our rights, the prosecutors get to pick... and they pick ones they think they have the best odds of winning, or in other words the cases with the best chance of letting them erode our rights, the best chance of having a chilling effect, the best chance of not resulting in a loss for the state that instead strengthens the freedoms they're trying to undermine.

So it's almost inevitable that our privacy is defended through the lens of accused pedophiles our our freedom of speech through obvious racists. The case being unfortunate is a _default_. But by comparison with those, prosecuting Aaron Swartz over this was like federally prosecuting hippy anti-war protesters putting up posters for _littering_. Wouldn't it have been better if did nothing that could be accused of being littering? Yes but the prosecutor would simply have waited for a different case where someone did, and it would just be that case being used to chill the public's freedoms. We could be a lot worse off than fighting for access to (primarily publicly funded!) knowledge through an accused trespasser. The choice of case would matter personally to the accused, but not to us-- if anything it's not hard to imagine a case much more muddled than one against Aaron that they could have used, say someone with a arguable commercial angle or a connection to a hostile state interest. Whatever case is being used as a proxy to attack the rights of all of the rest of us will always have some extra angle making it more complicated.

Sadly Aaron didn't get the support he needed from the public (including myself), he wasn't in the right place to see it through, and the intensity of federal prosecution is just out of odds with producing justice in the face of potentially vulnerable targets. It did end the political aspirations of the prosecutor, for whatever its worth.