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Comment by elt0n | Hacker News Reader

I guess a touchy question I would've liked to see is "How was it working with Aaron Swartz?," because he seemed like a wonderful person to work with.

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Except that the entire team hated him. They don't talk about it since his death, likely out of respect, but they were pretty open about him fucking off to Europe and deciding not to show up for a few weeks. They were really angry about him claiming to be a cofounder and insisted that he had very little to do with reddit outside of writing web.py.

Funny how the accepted narrative changes after someone dies.

Edit: Background: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman...

> outside of writing web.py

Very little to do with it except for writing the framework that scaled it to acquisition? Seems like a fairly important contribution to me.

They ended up rewriting it in Pylons soon after the acquisition. So yeah, it's technically true that he wrote the framework that scaled it to acquisition, but were he not there, they probably would've just written it in Pylons to begin with - it was available around that time, and was fairly popular among YC startups of that vintage (DropBox also started out with Pylons).

You can say that about a lot of things though. The fact remains that he was there, and they did use web.py to get to the acquisition.

But what conclusions are you drawing from that? I think perhaps that might be where you and the OP could find some actual points for discussion vs just throwing facts around.

The point is that a spiritual cofounder is just as legitimate as an actual blood-and-sweat cofounder.

An early acquisition that he played a pivotal role inducing. They would have been better off without him, so it's hard to call him a founder with a straight face.

I'm sorry if he was some kind of hero of yours that you have to emphasis some trivial contribution he made in the grand scheme of Reddit's success.

My understanding is that reddit "scaled" by putting their infrastructure on top of Memcached's shoulders. While I have no doubt Reddit's grounding in Python allowed them to iterate important early features quickly, it wasn't like web.py was the only way to do that back then.

web.py was not an internal project. Yes, Swartz wrote the framework that they rewrote the site in (before later ditching it), but he did so outside of reddit and, iirc, wrote it before joining reddit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51093

If Aaron Swartz isn't a cofounder of reddit, then Elon Musk isn't a cofounder of PayPal. [1]

Edit: As far as I can see, the situation is almost exactly the same. Elon Musk's X.com and PayPal merged into PayPal. And Aaron's Infogami and reddit merged into reddit. The only difference I see is that the reddit founders don't like Aaron being a "cofounder". If they were both mergers, then I think it's fair to call both Elon and Aaron cofounders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history

Two points, one minor and one major:

1) Reddit and Infogami merged into Not a Bug, not reddit.

2) Musk acted as a cofounder after the merge; Swartz did not. Swartz stuck around for a couple months post-merge then disappeared. So if you want to call him a "reddit cofounder", you can only do so in the loosest terms possible. He wasn't there for the founding and he didn't put in the work, but it says "cofounder" on the company papers.

> company papers

Technically correct... The best kind of correct.

Take a few-weeks vacation is grounds for despisal now?

Not showing up for a few weeks without telling anyone, after collecting your rather large cheque while your "cofounders" bust their ass is likely to up the sodium content, yes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_th...

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexisOhanian/posts/HJz9Vd58Wtb

People are petty. Agreed.

> because he seemed like a wonderful person to work with.

Don't talk ill of the dead but my interactions with him were less than stellar. I think deep inside he had good intentions but the way he acted made me very angry and upset at times. My opinion on him changed later shortly before his death when he seemed more down to earth but that was years after I was almost mortal enemies with him.

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