To be fair, Aaron wasn't really heavily involved with Reddit. He was involved with Infogami, which failed and was merged with Reddit. Per this post, he got equity in Reddit as a result, but only worked for a few months on the actual site.
After his death and the media portrayal of him as a martyr for free speech, Reddit started claiming him as "co-founder" much more vocally than they had previously. While technically he had that title, his involvement on Reddit was neither starting the company nor working on it for any extended period of time.
That being said, given what Reddit's become, wherever his spirit roams now, I'm sure he's relieved to have his name off the site.
Thus spoke reality? Aaron founded another startup at the y combinator when it got merged into the reddit startup. But the fact that they merged at the y combinator would suggest that reddit already was founded before Aaron was involved. This is all easily verifiable information you’re just so angry that you aren’t on your favorite website that you are just making shit up at this point.
I find that people who judge a statement, not based on the whole of it's content, but on the surface aesthetic of it to be wholly smart as a bag of rocks.
I for one don’t see the issue with that “to be fair” statement here. The parent used it merely to announce that they were going to take the counter-point to the most likely community view, i.e., they were going to defend Reddit’s action of not naming Swartz as co-founder. They then proceeded to do so by explaining that Swartz never really played a co-founder role. The comment implied “to be fair [to whoever at Reddit made that decision] and then went on to provide supporting argumentation.
It’s quite different from the lazy use of the phrase, e.g., “to be fair, both sides suck” that you may find in political discussions without supporting arguments, for example.
Ok now you’re just being a troll. Instead of contributing meaningfully to the discussion, you picked up on three words each from the parent and myself, ignored the entirety of our respective arguments, and derailed what could have been an intelligent discussion about Aaron’s actual contributions to early Reddit and turned it into a superficial joust about some words you unilaterally proclaimed to be verboten.
Be better. Be more charitable and thoughtful. Otherwise we’re just pushing people back to Reddit.
the impression I got from that documentary about him was that he was quite ambivalent about reddit and had nothing to do with starting it. he was declared co founder in some symbolic way after the fact. IIRC his arm was twisted in some business deal and he didn't take any satisfaction from it. he immediately set about actively doing everything he could think of to make himself annoying in the hopes of being released from the obligation.
Is this wrong? If I am on the right track, I think it's kind of shitty to use the memory of a dead person who really did some good things to make a point about how scuzzy reddit is. Which we are all quite aware of. Reddit sucks case closed. IMHO it would be worse if they put his picture on every page and talked about him all the time. Reddit should keep his out of its mouth.
Aaron Schwartz did a bunch of cool things and reddit wasn't one of them. He helped develop RSS which unlike reddit we all still love when he was like 14. He made a browser extension to automatically share public domain legal documents the state was hoarding for money. And he set up a laptop in a closet at MIT to download all of JSTOR one article at a time because that shit belongs to all humanity. Among other things. Please have some respect for this person and stop belittling him in this way.
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