I wonder if this is why so many sites now started including previews of new content on old content pages. It's made trying to google by date range completely useless because google now thinks a 12 year old post is brand new because there's a preview of a new post at the bottom when they re-index it.

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.

To be a bit pedantic, you're referring to Image Macros, which are a subset of memes.

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.

Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.

What point was he trying to make here?

If you're only interested in topics then switching from another social network to fediverse isn't so bad. But a lot of the twitter userbase is there because they want to follow people not topics. If you're into journalism all the journalists are there. If you're in the art world all the artists are there. Prior to musk it was easy to know that you were following who you thought you were. And the value is in that group of people all being there.

It's like how it's not a big deal for me that I quit reddit to come here, but I still have to maintain a Facebook and LinkedIn presence for my career. I can't (yet, anyways) tell people I meet at conferences to look me up on fediverse and then have to explain what that is and how it works and make sure they follow the right account name from the right instance.

I finally just made an account on kbin.social to get a little more familiar with this whole fediverse thing and see where I want to actually consider home. But for the past few weeks I've been following the redditalternatives subreddit and looking at various instances of lemmy/kbin. I made a post there about noticing that depending on which instance I view a thread from it'll contain a different number of comments despite being the same thread shared with federated instances. I was told that the data sync (not sure the proper terminology yet) is still a bit laggy & buggy so it takes some for the data to propagate to all federated instances and some comments may not sync at all. This is one of my biggest concerns on using fediverse as a platform.

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?

They've been testing disabling the mobile site for a few months now. They were A/B testing on accounts and not letting them log in from mobile browsers for a awhile now. I don't expect it'll be long before they try to block all mobile devices from accessing their website except through their stupid app.

Innerspace

I LOVED this movie when I was a kid. I need to find a copy and give it a watch as I haven't thought about it in years.

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.

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.

Yes that's what I why I asked you to state more simply for me.

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.

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.

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?

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.