[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.

[benatkin]

I just noticed jl posted it!

[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.

[benatkin]

I think I understand it pretty well.

Edit: I had to retract what I said here because a lot of things the reddit founders said from 2006-2009 seem to be missing and I couldn't find anything to back it up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339

[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.