Fuck Spez
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
If I were him, I would be more concerned with my name being attached to this defense of child pornography: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/
If I were him I'd stand by that defense. It's a carefully worded and sane defense. He's not defending child abuse, he's saying, extremely clearly and plainly, that possession of evidence is not the same as committing abuse, and that the law shouldn't use possession as a scapegoat. Which, given that every attempt to censor the internet in the last 10 years has started with "protect the children", I'd say he was trying to cut that tactic off at the head.
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Such a weird stance to take and to make a point of wedging in there. I thought perhaps on reading I'd find he's being misinterpreted or taken out of context but he's very explicitly like "child porn isn't an issue and we should do nothing about it." Quite a worrying position for him to take.
People have a real way of finding the single most negatively-portrayable thing about a person and using it to smear their entire legacy. Post-humously. That page was written Dec 2002 according to the archive, which would make him a month over 16 years old when he wrote it. In the context of an argument in favor of having unlimited free speech, not a dedicated page on his website to "I want child pornography".
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Every justification for pervasive online surveillance starts with "it will protect the children."
So if you're someone who hates pervasive, overreaching, surveillence, taking the position that CP isn't actually harming children makes sense as a tactic. I don't think he was winning over too many converts to that POV though.
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That's a new low. Anyone who knows about Aaron and still using reddit - Shame on You.
Aaron was reddit, and since his passing its shit now.
RIP Mr Swartz, you are sorely missed.
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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/
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Obligatory FUCK SPEZ.
He's a cunt.
They just decided that because Aaron fought for free speech, this fact doesn't fit their agenda anymore so they removed it. Amazing.
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.
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.
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 nil in 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.
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".
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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.
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At the End of the day: The greedy man's gonna have nothing, literally nothing. For Aaron his legacy will continue.
We can hope, but if Facebook adn Microsoft taught us anything, is that the greedy man will keep fuckloads of cash
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Fuck spez.
u/spez is a complete and utter piece of shit
Ok. Now that is truly fucked up. Someone needs to check in on that fucker, he's not mentally healthy.
Ironically he is defeated by being censored out. :(
Yesterday, I finally decided to cut ties with reddit, except for targeted web searches. First it was the constant attempts to force me to download their app. Then denying me access to certain posts and subreddits cuz I wouldn't. Then the API debacle. Then few days ago, significant redesign that wasn't for usability, but for money,. Corporate greed. Used to spend hours on reddit, but past few weeks, there's hardly any worthwhile content. One has to be careful what one gets used to. Grateful I discovered lemmy yesterday.
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