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[–] 36 points 8 hours ago (12 children)
  • [–] 7 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (9 children)

    Instead of saying "fuck spez" like a drone, pivot to saying "remember Aaron" (so that people who don't know about him can learn something new)

    The fediverse LARPs so much about being inclusive and diverse but you're constantly betraying your tribal nature. Own it. If you're on the Good People Team, prove it with more than empty, hateful accusations OR substantiate those accusations beyond in-group signaling.

    Because this place is fundamentally the same echo chamber as reddit, and it faces the same peer pressure. The only thing that changes is the handle on the usernames, and the only way to be different is to completely ignore the upvote system and say what you actually think instead of what you expect other people to upvote you for (good job, you let your own mind regress to the mean).

    Unless your thoughts are as shallow as your words... are they?

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  • [–] 5 points 5 hours ago (6 children)

    I mean, sure? Aaron Swartz didn’t really do much with Reddit at all. The infatuation with him in terms of Reddit is kinda weird.

    He rewrote it from Lisp into Python, but that’s about it. He joined after the site was already live and was only there for about a year.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 hours ago* (3 children)

    He fought for information to be free by pirating JSTOR papers, and he was persecuted and prosecuted for it, and he killed himself (or did he? [vsauce music]).

    ... And now we have SciHub. Which is the same exact fucking thing as what he was trying to accomplish.

    Also he was instrumental to the invention of the RSS protocol:

    As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; and the Python website framework web.py. 
    

    The same RSS protocol that spez completely killed off a few months ago. Aaron's grave has been shat on so many times that it's basically a latrine now. But the people who say "fuck spez" know none of this, and if they do, they're cowards for not saying it out loud.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

    Yes his other work was far more instrumental. That’s also irrelevant to Reddit.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago (1 child)

    Reddit was initially written in Lisp?! His main contribution to Reddit was actually a bad one then :(

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago*

    Yeah it was written in Common Lisp. Spez wrote all the original code.

    When they merged with Infogami, Swartz became coowner and rewrote it using his web.py that he developed.

    That was the total extent he had with Reddit.

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