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Reddit’s founders seem to be pretty spineless for doing so. I didn’t even realise that they removed him..

meragrin_ 6y ago
I don't believe the Reddit founders ever considered him a founder. Tweet from 2011: https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904 https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904
- llcoolv 6y ago
  Well, they should not have given him such a job title then.
  - gowld 6y ago
    Suppose you get together with someone to found a company as cofounders, but then your cofounder nearly immediately leaves the company to pursue other projects. Why is it wrong to annul the designation? Swartz contributed technology (web.py) that Reddit used briefly, and deserves as much credit as other technology contributors of the same scale.
    - shubb 6y ago
      That doesn't seem to be a fair description - it seems like he originally ran a software house that were paid to build a lot of the original reddit, was acquihired and given the title founder, and then stuck with the company through acquisition before being re-assigned to another of the acquirers properties. Founder, not sure, but your narrative of someone barely involved doesn't stack up either. Also, early on, it seems he brought the technical knowhow, acting as an outside CTO, and also had high PR / name recognition value, so I think they owed him some recognition for sure.
    - adolph 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Sutcliffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Sutcliffe
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  Aaron was arrested January 6, 2011. That tweet is from July 2011. Anyone who was active on both HN and Reddit at that time quickly saw the community divided around the issue. Then Reddit was still trying to figure out how to generate revenue years after a conde nast acquisition and you could tell that the "leadership" team very quickly wanted to distance themselves from any controversy. Anyone active on Reddit or HN in the early days would have been surprised to here that Aaron was not considered a cofounder. It wasn't until after his legal trouble that the Reddit team tried to distance themselves from him and an his cause as fast as possible.
- cleansy 6y ago
  > For Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combination who worked with Swartz, Huffman and Ohanian, Aaron Swartz is right to call himself a Reddit founder. > Speaking on Reddit a few years ago, Graham said: “The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups…and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.” [1] sounds pretty clear to me.. 1: https://www.thefocus.news/tech/aaron-swartz-reddit/ https://www.thefocus.news/tech/aaron-swartz-reddit/
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    This may be unfair as Aaron isn't there to give his side of the story, but the way I understand is that the YC put these 1+2 people (who were all talented) together to help build reddit, but Huffman and Ohanian were far more interested in building reddit as it was originally their project and they had been working on it for 6 months, and it seems like Aaron wasn't as interested in it. So yes, while Graham did forcingly merge these two together, I don't think it necessarily makes Aaron a co-founder and contributor. EDIT: Just to add, Aaron's project was "infogami" which seems to be a CMS system, and I'm not sure how much of that actually contributed to reddit. It seems like his project was mostly scratched and the project that Huffman & Ohanian were working on ended up being the real success.
    - Zak 6y ago
      Early versions of reddit's wiki were more or less reskinned infogami. As to the co-founder question, Aaron was definitely a co-founder of the merged reddit/infogami company, but he didn't contribute much after that, leading to his departure. I think that, rather than any controversy over his arrest is why Steve and Alexis didn't really consider him a co-founder.
      - dpritchett 6y ago
        Here’s Swartz detailing how Reddit was rewritten in his own Python framework a scant six months after launch: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
NoSorryCannot 6y ago
Reddit seems pretty unprincipled in general. Their decisions wouldn't be so bad if they appeared to stem from a coherent principle but overall they seem to only be reacting and doing whatever is politically expedient in the moment. Not unlike most orgs I suppose.
- Bakary 6y ago
  Sounds like a principle to me. edit: to make this answer less of a throwaway line: it's a principle that underpins most of the MMR-based ideology on this very same website and animates most of the tech scene in general, "making the world a better place" statements notwithstanding. How many of you here can genuinely pretend otherwise in your professional life? A portion perhaps, but clearly the minority. Beyond the simple cynicism of pointing it out, this principle seems to be quite stable and efficient in the face of an audience that shifts its priorities every two seconds. Perhaps the better question to ask would be why the system of incentives that we have cultivated rewards this behavior. The crowd rewards certain behaviors, and in an increasingly postmodern world moral statements are usually lost in the noise or take the shape of a parody of themselves.
  - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
    I view a principle as being a belief held that one will hold the line on, even if to do so would be potentially costly. A principle isn't necessarily popular or just. Optimizing for traffic, revenue, or whatever else is certainly a strategy but I don't think it's a principle in the sense of someone or some people having principles. And I would add that the effective output of such a strategy, if it were the behavior of an individual, would probably be described as sociopathic.
    - Bakary 6y ago
      I agree with your general stance, but I do wonder if this strategy hasn't morphed into an ideology in itself or at least what we'd recognize as principles (which can indeed cost people by their definition, but not necesarily so) At least that is what I see with much of the content shared here. The world view that percolates across all those articles is one that praises hustle culture, a mechanistic optimization of life, rationality fetishism, "hacking" social relationships, founder/mogul worship and many other ideas that support entrepreneurial success as the fundamental arbiter of value and moral worth. I even saw a few people sincerely believing thar systemic poverty could be alleviated with some bootsrapped startup concept. Essentially a mix of sociopathy and technocracy that can also paradoxically function as a guiding light for non-sociopathic people.

I don't believe the Reddit founders ever considered him a founder. Tweet from 2011: https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904 https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904

llcoolv 6y ago
Well, they should not have given him such a job title then.
- gowld 6y ago
  Suppose you get together with someone to found a company as cofounders, but then your cofounder nearly immediately leaves the company to pursue other projects. Why is it wrong to annul the designation? Swartz contributed technology (web.py) that Reddit used briefly, and deserves as much credit as other technology contributors of the same scale.
  - shubb 6y ago
    That doesn't seem to be a fair description - it seems like he originally ran a software house that were paid to build a lot of the original reddit, was acquihired and given the title founder, and then stuck with the company through acquisition before being re-assigned to another of the acquirers properties. Founder, not sure, but your narrative of someone barely involved doesn't stack up either. Also, early on, it seems he brought the technical knowhow, acting as an outside CTO, and also had high PR / name recognition value, so I think they owed him some recognition for sure.
  - adolph 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Sutcliffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Sutcliffe
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
Aaron was arrested January 6, 2011. That tweet is from July 2011. Anyone who was active on both HN and Reddit at that time quickly saw the community divided around the issue. Then Reddit was still trying to figure out how to generate revenue years after a conde nast acquisition and you could tell that the "leadership" team very quickly wanted to distance themselves from any controversy. Anyone active on Reddit or HN in the early days would have been surprised to here that Aaron was not considered a cofounder. It wasn't until after his legal trouble that the Reddit team tried to distance themselves from him and an his cause as fast as possible.
cleansy 6y ago
> For Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combination who worked with Swartz, Huffman and Ohanian, Aaron Swartz is right to call himself a Reddit founder. > Speaking on Reddit a few years ago, Graham said: “The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups…and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.” [1] sounds pretty clear to me.. 1: https://www.thefocus.news/tech/aaron-swartz-reddit/ https://www.thefocus.news/tech/aaron-swartz-reddit/
- ehsankia 6y ago
  This may be unfair as Aaron isn't there to give his side of the story, but the way I understand is that the YC put these 1+2 people (who were all talented) together to help build reddit, but Huffman and Ohanian were far more interested in building reddit as it was originally their project and they had been working on it for 6 months, and it seems like Aaron wasn't as interested in it. So yes, while Graham did forcingly merge these two together, I don't think it necessarily makes Aaron a co-founder and contributor. EDIT: Just to add, Aaron's project was "infogami" which seems to be a CMS system, and I'm not sure how much of that actually contributed to reddit. It seems like his project was mostly scratched and the project that Huffman & Ohanian were working on ended up being the real success.
  - Zak 6y ago
    Early versions of reddit's wiki were more or less reskinned infogami. As to the co-founder question, Aaron was definitely a co-founder of the merged reddit/infogami company, but he didn't contribute much after that, leading to his departure. I think that, rather than any controversy over his arrest is why Steve and Alexis didn't really consider him a co-founder.
    - dpritchett 6y ago
      Here’s Swartz detailing how Reddit was rewritten in his own Python framework a scant six months after launch: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

NoSorryCannot 6y ago

Reddit seems pretty unprincipled in general. Their decisions wouldn't be so bad if they appeared to stem from a coherent principle but overall they seem to only be reacting and doing whatever is politically expedient in the moment. Not unlike most orgs I suppose.

Bakary 6y ago
Sounds like a principle to me. edit: to make this answer less of a throwaway line: it's a principle that underpins most of the MMR-based ideology on this very same website and animates most of the tech scene in general, "making the world a better place" statements notwithstanding. How many of you here can genuinely pretend otherwise in your professional life? A portion perhaps, but clearly the minority. Beyond the simple cynicism of pointing it out, this principle seems to be quite stable and efficient in the face of an audience that shifts its priorities every two seconds. Perhaps the better question to ask would be why the system of incentives that we have cultivated rewards this behavior. The crowd rewards certain behaviors, and in an increasingly postmodern world moral statements are usually lost in the noise or take the shape of a parody of themselves.
- NoSorryCannot 6y ago
  I view a principle as being a belief held that one will hold the line on, even if to do so would be potentially costly. A principle isn't necessarily popular or just. Optimizing for traffic, revenue, or whatever else is certainly a strategy but I don't think it's a principle in the sense of someone or some people having principles. And I would add that the effective output of such a strategy, if it were the behavior of an individual, would probably be described as sociopathic.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    I agree with your general stance, but I do wonder if this strategy hasn't morphed into an ideology in itself or at least what we'd recognize as principles (which can indeed cost people by their definition, but not necesarily so) At least that is what I see with much of the content shared here. The world view that percolates across all those articles is one that praises hustle culture, a mechanistic optimization of life, rationality fetishism, "hacking" social relationships, founder/mogul worship and many other ideas that support entrepreneurial success as the fundamental arbiter of value and moral worth. I even saw a few people sincerely believing thar systemic poverty could be alleviated with some bootsrapped startup concept. Essentially a mix of sociopathy and technocracy that can also paradoxically function as a guiding light for non-sociopathic people.