Fuck Spez
I really love it when you do that to me
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.
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.
In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.
This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.
I don’t know if that’s the reason CP is actually banned, but his logic is even worse and dumber by a mile.
I mean, the article linked in that page (albeit horribly long due to useless info) does raise a point against current laws on viewing illegal material.
But sharing it? Yeah that’s a bit of a stretch. Thinking that isn’t going to lead to more actual children being exploited is extremely naive.
Thinking that isn’t going to lead to more actual children being exploited is extremely naive.
That particular argument doesn’t hold water. We don’t generally subscribe to this kind of argument.
The general principle behind the specific argument you bring up here is this: All expression which is likely to inspire someone toward illegal action should itself be illegal.
CP is likely to inspire some people toward child abuse. Child abuse is illegal. Thus the distribution of CP should be illegal.
We don’t do this anywhere else.
Descriptions of non consesnual violence are likely to inspire some people toward non consensual violence. Non consensual violence is illegal. Thus the distribution of all descriptions of non consensual violence should be illegal.
If we take this seriously, we have to ban action movies. And I am not even getting into the whole porn debate…
No, the only valid reason for banning the distribution of child porn which I can think of, lies in the rights of the victims. The victims were abused, and their image was used without their consent. Without them even possibly being able to give consent to any of that, or the distribution that follows.
So anyone who shares child porn, is guaranteed to share a piece of media which shows someone being subjected to a crime, while they couldn’t possibly give consent for that to be recorded, or shared publicly. Making it illegal to share someone being a victim of a crime, without them being able to consent to that being shared, is a reasoning which has far fewer problems than what you propose here.
You raise a few valid points, but the problem with the action film thing is that it is fiction, and thus protected by free speech rights.
That’s actually the main argument against lolicon being illegal: depictions of other crimes, including heinous ones like murder and rape, are not illegal.
Ultimately it comes down to inconsistency in the law, and sensationalism makes it very difficult to discuss rationally.
The general principle behind the specific argument you bring up here is this: All expression which is likely to inspire someone toward illegal action should itself be illegal
To me it’s more like “All situations where committing illegal actions could bring a positive feedback to the perpetrator should be avoided”.
Allowing CP to be shared, and thus sold/hosted on for-profit sites creates a market for it, and makes abusing children an actual profession. That’s not ok and already a talking point against the current, legal, porn industry.
that line of reasoning sort of assumes that there can’t be a market for illegal things, something anyone should be able to realize is fundamentally untrue, examples; Drugs, Firearms, the very CP we are talking about, rape porn, snuff porn, etc… they all have markets even tho they are completely or partially (like the firearms, with only some falling into the category) illegal
Yes, that’s why CP is banned. It being distributed and sold encourages the further making of it, thus leading to more instances of children being abused.
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…
I said some dumb things too, but not “child porn isn’t abuse and should be legal”. That’s straight up predatory. You can’t tell me a 16 year old shouldn’t know better
Yes, I can. 16 years old is a child. I also live in one of the first jurisdictions in the world to legalise 15-17yo sexting images. I wonder if his frustration came from restrictions he faced at the time. I thought it was pretty dumb as a teen that I couldn’t take a picture of my own naked body. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“child porn isn’t abuse and should be legal”
I think that this is not true. It definitely is abuse. But I also think that the argument for why it is so, is not that trivial.
I mean, can you make it? Try it out!
Let’s say someone distributes CP. How does what happens here, the sending of 0s and 1s across a wire, constitute abuse?
If you think about it like that, it doesn’t.
Of course if you take into account a broader context, then this argument does break down. For the details you would probably need complex words and terms like “retraumatization” and “inability to consent”, and “right to one’s own image”, and know a bit about what those things are, and how they work.
I wouldn’t expect every 16 year old today to be able to get all of that straight. And I would not expect any 16 year old in the early 2000s, an age long, long before metoo, and any sensitivity toward sexual trauma, to be able to get that.
I’m sorry but I’m not about to hold people accountable for dumb things they said as a teen.
I sure love it when people use a single opinion to smear a person’s entire legacy, he was great not only for the tech stuff but his stance on scientific articles piracy and a lot of other stuff too.
I won’t say that that his opinion on cp is a great one (there is no doubt at least for me that distribution should always be illegal), but he wrote it as a 16 years old and it was guided due to his extremism for free speech over the internet, regardless, it’s not like he himself was an evil person distributing child pornography, to paint him as an overall shitty person for an opinion like this seems idiotic imo
This is q bit personal and maybe slightly unrelated, but it reminds me of when people defend non-offending pedos (as in they are attracted to children because yhey are born that way but have not offended, nor groomed, nor harmed a child) saying the stigma should be erased because that would allow us to actually help this people who constantly hide it, therefore reducing the harm to children. This position has unironically got me called a pedophile and a lot of horrible stuff over the internet, and I would draw parallels to this situation, no matter how you slice it this opinion should not be used singlehandedly to state he is someone that shouldn’t be respected. Especially since he is not defending the harm itself being done to children (as in the production of CP) which would still be a crime under his view. (Although distribution of course grows the market so it’s idiotic not to go after that too), but as I said, it’s a bad opinion but that doesn’t make him a bad person.
I’m not saying Aaron was 100% bad, my point is that I don’t really think he’s some modern-day hero either. And I’ve already replied to someone that dismissed the his child porn views as a forgotten childhood comment. It wasn’t merely a poorly thought out comment he made at 16 and forgot about, he maintained and edited that page until his death, even restoring it after a server crash deleted it.
If you want to celebrate his tech contributions or his views on scientific piracy I’m all for it. I just don’t agree with this view of him getting spread that he’s some hero co-founder of Reddit that is being unfairly erased from history when that’s inaccurate at best. He’s just a dude that did some great things, had some great views, had some really really shit views, and never gave a shit about reddit.
FYI your link is broken and is just leading to the archive home page
Sorry I’m brand new here. The link I put is https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/ which loads an archived copy of his homepage as it’s no longer online since his death. The link loads properly for me on all my devices, even when i click it from my comment. Did I perhaps format the link incorrectly here and that’s why it’s not working? I know it’s a bit of an odd url format that the wayback machine uses.
Still not formatted correctly on memmy. Let’s see if this works…
https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/
looks like a bug in lemmy or certain clients. Probably to do with the double absolute URL’s in archive links…
Your link isn’t working for me
It’s a link to an archive of his http://bits.are.notabug.com site on the wayback machine as his site is no longer online. It’s working for me on my PC and my phone. I can take a screenshot and share it if your browser is unable to load the wayback machine?
Dont Link to Us is like saying, “Dont Mention us on your coffee shop’s Bulliton board”, is that why redditors call “Starbucks” things like “That one coffee shop with the green logo”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=CE0EB5bXj14
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
i heard that Ohanian and Huffman have people out there trying to suggest that he was a pedo or some shit, what about that
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=OXZYvrue1BE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Removed by mod
I thought the mod thing was because you used to be able to be modded for a subreddit without your approval
i really don’t give half a shit about any of them, they have their heads so far up their asses
These two run a rigged company plagued with censorship that over the years collaborated with all sort of scum including the chinese government. I really wouldn’t trust what they have to say
Oh…oh no
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.
I mean, he’s dead, so bit late for that.
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.
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.
He didn’t hang himself because of child porn. He hung himself because he was facing life in prison for downloading some journal articles. The government was trying to make an example out of him.
Actually he was facing 6 months on a plea deal but refused as he wouldn’t accept that he commited felonies. Then he killed himself rather than do his time.
Yeah, it wasn’t mandatory that he had to kill himself. It’s absurd that the gov’t was prosecuting him, and fuck scientific journals, but even if he served some time in prison… other people do that and, you know, get out of prison eventually.
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.
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.
But you have no problem creating judgement about the guy without knowing anything about him.
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.
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.
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He’s dead
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
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?
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
Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.
What point was he trying to make here?
read the rest of the page and you will find out
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You don’t understand suicide or depression. You’re making a grossly crass statement, no matter what the man may have done in life.
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You’re gonna have to dumb it down for me as I’m not sure what you mean by this in relation to this discussion.
He is saying that CP is illegal because it’s unpopular, not because “it’s the right thing to do.” So, if CP becomes popular in the future, then it totes will be fine.
Which is a fucking disgusting thing to say in 2023.
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You can use periods. It makes it easier to grok
Well, of course. You can cure cancer, but if you fuck kids, then people will remember you as the kid fucker. I don’t see how that’s a problem.
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no, people will only remember you as a kid fucker if you are poor, rich people just spend money on C&D + PR campaign, and watch how owning slaves and CP is washed out of public consciousness…
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Yes that’s what I why I asked you to state more simply for me.
They said that they don’t. That’s why they want you to explain it better.
Run on, sentences make very, hard for others to understand the, point you’re trying, to make.
It’s why all the appeals to “what would Aaron think” with the whole API thing were really off the mark.
spez and kn0thing were college buddies. Swartz was kind of pushed onto them by YC. I’ve never had the impression that they felt any particular attachment to him; he was a business partner that became involved at the behest of the people funding them, who left in the first couple of years.
He’s also listed right at the top of the page, in the screenshot where people are complaining about him not being listed. He doesn’t get a snoo caricature, but this seems like a not totally unreasonable (if literally comicly simplified) representation of a complex and fairly contentious founding relationship that DOES show Swartz’ involvement as one of the 3 founders.
That part of the screenshot is from Google, the rest is from reddit.
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.
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?
“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.
Which makes him a founder of “Not a bug”, not reddit.
This disgusts me.
Aaron Is one of my heroes. He died standing up for something he believed in.
Imagine if we got him to join Lemmy’s side
Edit: oh shit I didn’t know it, RIP
You can’t. Aaron is dead. He killed himself while he being blindsided by the courts for downloading journals and educational materials that were being kept behind paid walls.
F
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The dude said died
He would have thought the entire fediverse thing was fantastic.
I believe that Aaron stood up and didn’t grab ankle when confronted with overwhelming force sent from his intellectual and moral inferiors.
But being short on days to make eternity just we all have a crumple point. And the government’s executive branches have found crumpling to be so very easy to do.
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.
His name and a photo of him are right there on that page as a founder though.
You’re disgusted because someone didn’t draw him as a cartoon?
This is an example of revisionist history on the part of the ‘founders’ of reddit.
Is it though? Please tell exactly how.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/1674832
It smells like he was more involved than Steve Huffman makes him out to be.
Now don’t get me wrong, we might never know, but I know that from here on out we shouldn’t trust anyone who is spinning his legacy in any direction. And Reddit is doing exactly that currently.
Aaron referred to himself as a founding partner, and in a reddit AMA, he was asked why he called himself a founder, and he explained how the two companies were merged together and he became a founding partner. He offered Steve Huffman to stop referring to himself as a founding partner at Steve’s request. Steve never challenged Aaron’s claim while he was alive.
As a silver lining maybe it’s best people don’t associate him with what the site has become. He was a piece of its history, but he wasn’t trying to found what Reddit has become
Yes. I think Aaron would want to take his name off from there.
That’s a new low. Anyone who knows about Aaron and still using reddit - Shame on You.
I use reddit but most of my comments are about lemmy
People may criticize, but someone should advocate for this place, so the ones still there know where to go.
I don’t participate in any threads I just read nosleep lol
Actually I don’t read any threads other than bestofredditorupdates because I don’t trust the fodder of people that stuck around either!
From what I saw BoRU has a lemmy bot reporsting content here :) Not sure on NoSleep
Got a link?
You can check out the lemmit instance. A lot of instances have defederated from it (with good reason imo, because a bunch of lemmit communities are just links to reddit).
But some of the communities (that the lemmit bot creates from scraped subreddits) are just links to other sources. It doesn’t scrape comments but just the content. So I subscribe to the “TIL” and “World News” communities from Lemmit, because it’s just links for me to read.
Personally, I’m trying to move away from those as well, because I prefer to rely on the fediverse for the content I want. But it’s been a good option for me to still get certain material, while never actually using reddit myself. Some of the communities only link to old.reddit, so I ignored those. But mainly for news is what I’ve used it for, and it’s been good for weaning my last remaining ties to that sunken ship.
My next step will be reposting that same content to Lemmy communities myself. But I gotta handle up on some current (personal) life issues, before I can start contributing more to the content around here
Both do, I see them on all a lot.
Every time I did that I got downvoted to oblivion
Same. I’m getting tired of being called a MAGA supporter just cause I point out what kind of person Spez is. But I don’t fucking care. I’m going to keep bringing it up until people either leave or I’m banned. Literally the only reason why I visit reddit now is to tell people about Lemmy and Spez’s pedophilia.
I’m pretty far left politically and I can’t stand Spez. The guy is the definitive self absorbed capitalist… seems pretty Republican to me.
Aaron was reddit, and since his passing its shit now.
RIP Mr Swartz, you are sorely missed.
I need a history lesson. Who is Aaron, what’s his deal?
Watch the documentary The Internet’s Own Boy. It’s very much worth the watch.
Honored to teach you about Aaron Swartz,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
He was the best of us and the jack boots murdered him. Free flow of ideas and knowledge, we cant have that. And reddit went to shit after… Again he was a poet warrior, I wish he was still here.
One of the cofounders of Reddit. Killed himself. Here’s his wiki. Aaron Swartz
What an appropriate homage - linking to one of markdown’s originator’s Wikipedia page using markdown.
“In 2002 Aaron Swartz created atx and referred to it as “the true structured text format”. Gruber created the Markdown language in 2004, with Swartz acting as beta tester … Markdown: Swartz was a major contributor to John Gruber’s Markdown,[249][250] a lightweight markup language for generating HTML, and author of its html2text translator. The syntax for Markdown was influenced by Swartz’s earlier atx language (2002)” from wikipedia
Oh wow holy shit that link thing worked
Brackets for the words you want. Immediately followed by parentheses. I’m sure this confuses some British folk but that’s a problem for another day
From a technical standpoint it irritates me that it’s not the URL in brackets and the words in parenthesis. But I also got used to it over 10 years ago so it is what it is.
I’m curious why it is technically wrong. My only knowledge of programming is Matlab and a Coursera course on Intro to Python, so I have no idea why it would matter one way or the other. What is the technical standpoint you are referencing?
Really fucking blessed memory. He was one of the real ones. I’ll never forget what Aaron did.
https://karolina.andersdotter.cc/2023/01/in-memoriam-aaron-swartz-1986-2013/
I can’t believe it’s been ten fucking years already.
They just decided that because Aaron fought for free speech, this fact doesn’t fit their agenda anymore so they removed it. Amazing.
I think Aaron would be proud of what people is doing with the Fediverse as Lemmy or Kbin. Without a protocol and decentralization we would not have free speech.
This permanently sealed the deal for me. I will never use Reddit as anything other than a search engine operator for finding niche information. Of all the unethical and sociopathic decisions that have been made over the years, this one I can never forgive. Steve Huffman is a cancer, and if he had any ounce of humanity left in him he would be ashamed of himself for allowing this.
Obligatory FUCK SPEZ.
He’s a cunt.
Back when “reddit.com” was a subreddit. I remember the thread (you can still visit it today) regarding his early departure. And how Aaron and spez didn’t really want to disclose the “real reason”. But, it saddens me how the public viewed his contributions as complete
nilin result of no full disclosure (Aaron did simply state corporate life (post acq.) was not for him, but everyone says that).Especially during times like this when the same batch of Aaron’s year (Altman, Huffman, etc) are pushing closed source thoughts. We need Open Access civics, like Aaron again.
Guys like Aaron will always be forced out by guys like Steve because guys like Aaron don’t want to be assholes, which is a necessity guys like Steve have no issue with.
It’s not a surprise that the c-suite has the highest number of psychopaths.
I looked into this more. Reddit (created by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) merged with Infogami (created by Aaron Schwartz). There are people calling Aaron Schwartz one of the founders, but that doesn’t seem entirely accurate.
Just because one outside source merges with another, doesn’t mean you’re a founder of the source that you’ve absorbed to. That’d be like saying Microsoft and Apple merged, so Steve Jobs is a founder of Microsoft. It doesn’t work like that. He’d still be considered a founder of Apple.
That’s not the best analogy. A better one would be Tesla, which started in 2001, incorporated in 2003, but didn’t meet Elon Musk until 2004. He’s listed as a co-founder. https://www.tesla.com/elon-musk
Didn’t he buy the co-founder status?
In the early fall of 2005, he worked with his fellow co-founders of another nascent Y-Combinator firm, Reddit, to rewrite its Lisp codebase using Python and web.py.
This is more than just “merging his company into Reddit”.
Yeah, rewriting the entire project in a different language is a huge undertaking.
That dude was great, he helped contribute to RSS as well. RIP
And Creative Commons. And SOPA. And WIkiLeaks. He was an Open Access civil servant in its true form.
They really are doing their best to look like shitheads, aren’t they.
It’s old news, they removed him from the founders list two years ago.
This is true but also old news from what I remember they took him off that page a long time ago. Reddit has been heading toward it’s inevitable demise ever since Aaron passed. Glad I finally left for good.
Wait. Back up.
I haven’t been embroiled in the drama that is Reddit and it’s founding… But the “c-level” guy that was basically the free speech advocate of the admin team… Died?
This explains a lot actually.
He hung himself after being prosecuted by the federal authorities for academic journal article piracy. He was trying to make journal articles available to the masses and was facing life in prison for it. This was many years ago.
What a world we live in
He was too good for this world.
He also defended child porn and advocated for making it legal.
Maybe don’t idolize people.
Wasn’t he like 16 years old when he posted that? I certainly said some pretty stupid stuff when I was that age.
There’s saying stupid things as a teenager, and then there’s defending child porn.
I’ve said a lot of stupid stuff as a teenager too but never felt like saying child porn should be legal or that it wasn’t abuse. That’s something that you should know by 16.
He died for what he believed in, I suppose. I wonder if Richard Stallman had any comment on it, since he’s kind of the OG digital freedom of information guy.
You could email him and ask. I’ve heard he answers a lot of the emails random people send
I could. I’m sure he’s doing far more important work for the freedom of information, I wouldn’t want to distract him from that important work.
Also I’m sure I could come up with something far more interesting to ask if I did.
he died in 2013. his involvement with reddit ended officially in 2007, but even by his own admission he stopped any involvement with the company when it was acquired by conde nast - he was part of reddit for less than a year.
his death really doesn’t have anything to do with reddit’s current trajectory
That’s good to know; even if he hadn’t died; he still wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. May he rest in peace.
