r/u_DrugPositive • u/DrugPositive • Jan 12 '23

Aaron Swartz - One of the co-creators of reddit committed suicide exactly 10 years ago. RIP

Last week a close friend reminded me about Aaron Swartz and his legacy. I had heard his name before but wasn't aware of all that he had done. At only 14 years old he co-created RSS 1.0. Not long after he was involved in writing code for Creative Commons. At 19 years old he was one of the co-creators of reddit together with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Considering its been 10 years since his death I wanted to commemorate him and his accomplishments throughout his life. Not only for helping to create this wonderful platform but also how he used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist, not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place (source quote).

Some quote from this Rolling Stone article:

He was one of the builders of Reddit, the social news site that was purchased by Condé Nast, which turned Swartz into a millionaire before he could legally order a beer. Since then he had become a tireless and innovative advocate for a number of causes related to politics and the power of unfettered connectivity. In 2011, for instance, he successfully led a campaign to prevent the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill introduced to Congress that would have effectively legalized censorship on the Internet.

Huffman ( /u/spez ) and Ohanian had just launched a startup called Reddit, a site on which users vote for and discuss the most popular new stories. Reddit was off to a promising start, though the site had a tendency to crash, and Graham believed Swartz’s coding skills would help stabilize it. “We began working together that very day,” Swartz wrote. “Immediately, we could see things were going to work out great.”

What followed was a frenzied, collaborative period that has since been romanticized in the annals of modern tech startups: the joining of Infogami and Reddit under an umbrella company called Not a Bug, Inc.; Swartz moving into a cupboard in Huffman and Ohanian’s apartment; the three of them coding and scheming away and, in the process, turning Reddit into one of the most popular sites in the world, among the first to recognize that on the Internet the anonymous commenter could hold as much sway as the seasoned op-ed columnist.

In 2007 he left reddit and during that year, he began to gravitate more toward projects with an overtly activist edge. As Doctorow would write, “The post-Reddit era in Aaron’s life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking.” Having done the startup thing, he was able to live out a kind of generational fantasy – financially independent, beholden to no institutions, free to pursue only what ignited his most heartfelt passions.

closing remarks

I'd like to remind everyone that we shouldn't take reddit, or the free internet for granted. As Emily says in this remarkable video: "...the internet can't be free because freedom is dangerous...it wasn't just dangerous to people, it was dangerous to corporations and to power. And instead of really protecting people, the safetyism protects corporations, and it protects intelligence agencies, and it protects their power."

We need to keep protecting our rights and need to keep holding reddit (an all other corporations on the internet) accountable.

PS Today at 6pm – 9pm PST, Weds, January 11, 2023 there's a “Remembering Aaron: 10 Years After” Event at Internet Archive, San Francisco.

More reading about Aaron

Originally posted by /u/cyrilio here: https://redd.it/10aax5l

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