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.
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.
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.
I think that the right to privacy is greater than the right to free speech.
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.
Yes we do. Plenty of stuff is banned by federal law. Snuff films, for the same reason as CP/CSAM. Obscene pornography (stuff showing abuse or degradation, even if it’s just acting) isn’t illegal to posses, but it is illegal to buy, distribute or carry across state lines. Ivory is illegal, unless you have a certificate proving it is from pre-1989. These are all banned to stop demand.
And that’s not even getting started Americas long history of banning books.
Yes we do. Plenty of stuff is banned by federal law.
Do you get what I mean? If you do, why are you being so overly literal here?
Snuff films, for the same reason as CP/CSAM
And action movies are not. Neither are horror or slasher movies. Neither is porn. Even though each of them might (or might not) inspire and incentivize illegal deeds.
It is not a general principle we subscribe to. It is enforced very selectively, and only in areas that we find most shocking. Which is understandable, but neither reasonable, nor consistent. I don’t know about you, but I think criminal law should be based on principles which are reasonable and consistent.
One such principle may be: “Media which may inspire illegal action, should be illegal themselves”
But that’s not consistently enforced, but selectively, limited by criteria which seem dubious at best.
This is what I mean, when I say “This argument does not hold water”
These are all banned to stop demand.
And that’s the interesting question: Why only these things, and nothing else? There is plenty of stuff out there which may inspire people toward illegal action, from real world depictions of violence, to action movies.
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.
Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.
What the fuck. How is this guy a CEO and not publicly shunned?
Edit: My bad, I thought that was text posted by Spez.
He’s dead
He’s dead. That’s why
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.
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.
He was 16 years old when he posted this. The statement is disgusting and not really defensable by itself, but I wonder if this was a dumb naive teenage take, or if he still thought this way up until he died.
I also don’t know if he was actually a pedophile, or if he just thought freedom of information on the web should be taken to the extreme. I would lean towards the latter since he seemed to have a relationship with an older woman at some point, but I don’t think I will ever truly know for sure.
That archive date I linked is from shortly after his death. If you go through the various archive dates you can see that he made changes to the page over the years. He added the bit about wanting a violent overthrow of the government when he was 18 or 19. In 2007 when he would have been 21, the archive just shows a note that he had a server crash and the site is gone but you can email him if you want a copy of it. By the time he was 22 he’d put the site back online. He made more edits visible through the following years until his death. So yeah we don’t know his thoughts but we do he continued to maintain that page, even choosing to restore it after a server crash, until the point he killed himself. It’s not as though it’s an online post he made as a kid and forgot about.
Thank you for the clarification there. I was not aware of the history of that cringey page. I had no idea that he kept it up and running like that.
The statement is disgusting and not really defensable by itself
I hate it when this happens. Why do feelings always play into this discussion? “The statement is disgusting”, is not an argument, and should never be part of any discussion.
No matter how disgusted a statement might make you feel, if it has a good argument behind it, it should be regarded as true.
I agree that the argument doesn’t quite work. And that’s that.
I just meant that it makes me feel gross. I imagine many people feel the same. I guess the statement itself isn’t disgusting, but what it is advocating for is. On the other hand,
the argument doesn’t quite work.
is putting it a bit lightly, in my opinion. Mostly because pedophilia is a generally despised act that should probably not really be argued for in the first place.
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
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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.
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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
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.
He’s dead
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.
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.
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.
Obligatory FUCK SPEZ.
He’s a cunt.
It should have been spez
Please God, give us Aaron Schwartz back and take Spez. Thanks!
Ok. Now that is truly fucked up. Someone needs to check in on that fucker, he’s not mentally healthy.
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?
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.
Watch the documentary The Internet’s Own Boy. It’s very much worth the watch.
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?
Fuck Spez
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
He would have thought the entire fediverse thing was fantastic.
The dude said died
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.
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.
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?
Top half is a google search, the bottom is the Reddit website. Notice how the official website says “created by two friends.”
Man, you people need to put the rage aside and actually read things other than posts.
Between November 2005 and January 2006, Reddit merged with Aaron Swartz’s company Infogami, and Swartz became an equal owner of the resulting parent company, Not A Bug.[36][37] Ohanian later wrote that instead of labeling Swartz as a co-founder, the correct description is that Swartz’s company was acquired by Reddit 6 months after he and Huffman had started.[38]
Was it really ‘acquired’ as much as ‘directed to be merged by Ycombinator investors’? Seems fair to add him as a co-founder since the merger became a new organziation “Not a Bug”, and without him the site wouldn’t exist in a state that allowed it grow quickly when the time came for Not a Bug to get bought out by Conde Nast in 2006…
Reddit the website already existed at that time though.
Here is a link to what reference 38 since it didn’t get included
https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904?s=20
ATTN @nytimes Steve Huffman & I founded @reddit . We acquired Aaron Swartz’s company infogami 6mos after we launched.
Acquired implies that they purchased infogami, when in reality they were merged into a new company by ycombinator, which made Aaron a founding partner… When reddit was bought by conde nast, his ownership was paid, and he became an employee, but he didn’t like working for conde nast, so he basically got himself fired.
It seems like a philosophical question for you then. Do you consider Elon Musk a founder of Tesla? Similar thing, he was not part of it during the founding technically. I’m trusting the primary source of that tweet I linked.
Because Reddit was created by two people.
Aaron was not involved in the starting of Reddit whatsoever. He didn’t come on board until Ycombinator basically forced a merge between Reddit and Infogami 6 months after Reddit launched.
And he was fired within a year.
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.
Fuck spez.
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
Fuck loads of cash but nothing to show for it.
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They’ll get theirs eventually, imho. Maybe not this go around, but it’ll happen. Always does.
Maybe.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
u/spez is a complete and utter piece of shit
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.
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.
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
Fuck spez… But where is Alexis on all of this? Does he comment, or just cashes the checks now?
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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”.
Yeah, rewriting the entire project in a different language is a huge undertaking.
yeah thats working for a company but not founding it
Yeah, I have noticed this too. Nobody really ever mentioned him as a founder of reddit before a few years ago, and now it’s like some legend of internet lore. He was famous for different things and never called a founder of reddit from what I recall.
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?
Nobody cares about u/spez !
