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.

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.

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

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.

Sorry I'm brand new here. The link I put is https://web.archive.org/... 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.

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?

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.

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

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=CE0EB5bXj14

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

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.

He's dead

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?

You don't understand suicide or depression. You're making a grossly crass statement, no matter what the man may have done in life.

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.

Run on, sentences make very, hard for others to understand the, point you’re trying, to make.

That part of the screenshot is from Google, the rest is from reddit.

"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.

F

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]

Is it though? Please tell exactly how.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's a weird hill to try and die on.

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

Yikes.

Welp there are no such things as good people anymore, just good actions by people. This is actually so horrible to see, thanks!

From what I saw BoRU has a lemmy bot reporsting content here :) Not sure on NoSleep

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.

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

Didn't he buy the co-founder status?

What a world we live in

He was too good for this world.

It's absolutely insane.

He died for what he believed in, I suppose. I wonder if Richard Stallman had any comment on it, since he's kind of the OG digital freedom of information guy.

That's good to know; even if he hadn't died; he still wouldn't have had anything to do with it. May he rest in peace.

I guarantee to you that there is not a SINGLE researcher that doesn't use scihub to get articles. This is so fucking unfair, I had no idea his death was due to this

Maybe.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...