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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is a quote from Aaron Swartz, a guy who (kinda sorta) co-founded Reddit, not the current CEO. Swartz has been dead for ten years and never had any leadership position with Reddit.
He’s dead. That’s why
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.
i really don’t give half a shit about any of them, they have their heads so far up their asses
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.
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
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
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.
He’s dead
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?
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 you have extra brackets in your link because this works
Oh…oh no
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”
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
Removed by mod
You don’t understand suicide or depression. You’re making a grossly crass statement, no matter what the man may have done in life.
deleted by creator
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…
Well either that or he’s advocating for the violent overthrow of the government on a platform that’s way less privacy focused than even reddit.
Either way a major league L.
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They said that they don’t. That’s why they want you to explain it better.
Yes that’s what I why I asked you to state more simply for me.
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.
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
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?
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?
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
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?
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.
Obligatory FUCK SPEZ.
He’s a cunt.
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
Like Ilya Zhitomiskiy, another dead hero.
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?
Top half is a google search, the bottom is the Reddit website. Notice how the official website says “created by two friends.”
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
I think it’s possible to recognise that valid concerns are hijacked for other purposes without needing to take a stance against the concerns themselves though.
IE I think child porn is a bad thing and we should work as a society to address it in a multi-faceted way. I also think that using that as a way to gain legal capabilities to infringe on people’s rights in a way that is not actually related to the prevention of child porn is also a bad thing. Those aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. Though I did see the claim that he was 16 at the time he wrote it, so it’s possible he worked that out later?
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”.
It’s also the last of the points, which he ordered from least to most controversial.
Well, free speech is more about the ideas than actions or words. He would be excercising free speech by stating that such free speech should be unlimited, but his infamous example wouldn’t really be a valid one
I think it’s the least worrying of possible stances protecting possession of CP
I think it’s the least worrying of possible stances protecting possession of CP
I’m not sure I’m willing to force my brain into considering the relative shadiness of different arguments for child pornography. It is a worrying stance, splitting hairs over whether he could have said something worse or not seems like an unproductive discussion.
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.
Disagree. The entire post is predicated on the false assertion that data is just a collection of arbitrary bits.
Its not a binary, wether “X” should be legal is based on the intent of the prosicutors and procicuted. Here, both are dubious going on the tiny amount of info i have
There’s not much for him to be concerned about currently, given that he is dead.
As for 16 yo Aaron who wrote that list of hot takes in order of controversy, is it really surprising that a kid that developed an opinion of free speech extremism penned that down?
Especially after being inspired by this article as per his own admission?The article also helps provide context for the time period this was written in.
Simple possession was still a relatively novel concept and simulated CSAM wasn’t criminal yet in the US.Don’t misconstrue my own position on the matter, I originate from, and was legally trained in, a jurisdiction that criminalizes hate speech, imposing a significantly broader limit on free speech than the US currently does, and I think that’s the better path to take.
So I personally don’t adhere to free speech extremism.Nevertheless, while not agreeing with his take, I can see the logic that persuaded him.
It’s essentially the facetious version of “Why stop here, why not also ban hate speech/guns/drugs/etc?”
All of those can be argued to be gateways to the harm of others, perhaps even disproportionately children.To me it reads as him challenging the logic, not condoning the outcome much less the subsequent consequences. Very edgy indeed.
As for those who bring up that he reinstated his blog multiple times and with it this particular post from when he was 16, as a way to posthumously attribute this to a more older adult version of him; I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry.
As a fundamentalist such as himself it could also just be an exhibition of his free speech extremism perhaps combined with an effort to maintain transparency.
After all, it could suggest an eroding of his beliefs on free speech if he would remove it “now” with little benefit to him since the cat’s already out of the bag, even if he disagreed with his former self at the time of restoring the blog.
A better indication of his opinions later in life would be comments that reaffirm the prior expressed beliefs or, if the suspicion is that he practiced what he preached, one would expect this to have come out during the FBI investigation, considering they went through all his data.
Do I think it’s healthy to consider him a hero, or anyone else for that matter?
No not really, if only because the likelihood of heroes having irreconcilable blemishes is extremely high just by the very virtue of their, let’s say, unique thinking producing the things we love about them but also the things that might cause pause in many.Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.
Yuck. People are making this argument now that AI-generated images exist but there is a reason r34 drawings of underage-looking fictional characters are banned too. Anyway, his points on copyright are alright; I don’t see why companies should retain rights to 20-year-old abandonware that they haven’t touched upon since its discontinuation.
Removed by mod
Well, I kinda get the longetivity of trademarks but you should absolutely be able to redistribute 40+ year old movies. If a studio is still making cash off the original Star Wars trilogy, they can remain in the green despite outputting literal garbage. Trademarks should have looser regulation so that you can release a clearly-labeled parody Mario game or non-canon Star Trek animation short without repercussion, like how the Touhou community works.
I mean, perhaps in the most general sense that is technically true. For example, there have been cases about this that have come from parents taking pictures of their kids in the bathtub, even if the charges were eventually dropped. If that particular court case had gone differently, it might’ve set a very destructive precedent that served only to rip apart families.
Still, 99% of the cases that produce this material are done so in an exploitative and abusive context; definitely not arguing with that. No idea was Aaron was talking about in that particular link, but this is the one counterexample that I think of that is valid, assuming it went a different direction in court.
Parents taking pictures of kids in the bathtub is evil and I would try to put my parents in jail for it if I could.
The link makes a (imo pretty valid) case for decriminalization of CP “consumption”, at least in cases where it’s not provably voluntary.
Sharing though is a different issue altogether and there’s absolutely no way someone sharing that stuff on the internet is doing it unintentionally.
I think it’s a very specific case that needs to be taken in a very narrow context; it’s essentially an innocent mistake that needs to be recognized as such. The moment you step outside of that, I see no reasonable arguments for decriminalizing anything.
Thing is it’s very hard to prove what’s an innocent mistake and what’s intentional behavior if we’re just talking about viewing. I personally think that alone shouldn’t guarantee more than getting put on a watchlist.
99% of the cases that produce this material are done so in an exploitative and abusive context
99%? Man you can just go full 100%
The only exception would be the r34 drawings if you consider them to be on the same level
Medical material. Keepsake photos of your newborn. A minor sending a nude pic to their minor partner.
Plenty of situations where technically illegal material is made with no malice at all.
Picking and choosing isn’t the game I want to play, I’m just highlighting that there are circumstances that can result in actually innocent people doing things without thinking. Pornographic content of any kind (drawings or otherwise) that depicts underage people in any context is something I think should be illegal and avoided at all costs, but I’m highlighting that there is edge-cases in everything.
And I just said you didn’t have to use 99% and could go full 100%
That’s what you get if you take an ideology, that in it self might be ok or even good to the extreme.
Freedom of speech is good, and in many ways there are laws that restrict freedom of speech more than would be good (especially concerning commercial stuff). But if you go freedom of speech fundamentalist, you have to argue for weird and downright evil things like he did in the section you quoted.
Goes to show, once again, that almost anything taken to the extreme turns into something evil.
Even ignoring the obvious issues with the child pornography stance, this blog post starts out on completely the wrong foot. The idea that data is just arbitrary bits is completely falacious and willfully ignorant. He’s asking us to ignore the fact that those bits represent information, which is more than an arbitrary set of bits. Or else we wouldn’t be sending them.
Not to mention his anthropomorphization of computers, which is also completely inaccurate. A computer “cares” more perhaps even more than us about the precise arrangement of the bits, because that is what allows them to convert those bits into specific actions. A single bit being off could in fact render the entire dataset illegible. Whereas a human who receives a typo-ridden call to arms, for example, may still be able to convert that particular set of bits into an actual act of violence.
I totally agree with what you say. I think, though, that the starting points of this post are already an extreme interpretation of the freedom of speech. The whole post is just a twised and extreme viewpoint.
What I find interesting though is, that the argument he arrived at, pretty much contradicts the purpouse of freedom of speech.
He’s like “Bits are just bits and the meaning of bits doesn’t matter”. But if it doesn’t matter, why would you need to protect that? Freedom of speech only deserves protection because the speech (or the information) matters. If it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t be a big deal if random combinations of bit-values would be made illegal.
Yes, I think you were correct originally that this is ultimately a freedom of speech issue. I would have the same argument against free speech absolutism. It just ignores the cause and effect related to communicating information. That’s why we have laws against speech that incites violence. Sometimes the effect of speech can be equal to or greater (by orders of magnitude) than physical action.
It’s always seemed strange to me that free-speech absolutists seem to argue that what people say doesn’t have much effect on the world.
If it’s so insignificant an act… Why are they so invested in protecting their right to do so without any constraints?
I definitely think it is abuse, how could it not be. But I have a feeling he was talking more about how someone life can be ruined very easily like the linked article talks about. Other than that idk
That’s a weird hill to try and die on.
yeah he’s a free speech absolutist
Yikes.
Welp there are no such things as good people anymore, just good actions by people. This is actually so horrible to see, thanks!
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.
It’s old news, they removed him from the founders list two years ago.
Fuck spez.
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.
They really are doing their best to look like shitheads, aren’t they.
Ok. Now that is truly fucked up. Someone needs to check in on that fucker, he’s not mentally healthy.
u/spez is a complete and utter piece of shit
