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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

I thought it really was founded by those two, and written in Lisp at that. Then YC hooked them up with Swartz and his big thing was rewriting in python. (And maybe there was some contention about this? I forget, but I seem to recall some drama at the time about his contributions.)

It was a long time ago, though, so I might be misremembering. In any case, I'm fairly certain Swartz did join after the fact, but I'm not sure if he joined with the title of co-founder or not.

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In Aaron Swartz's own words from May 2007

> One of the points of the merger was that we would all call ourselves co-founders, so that's what I've been doing. I'd be happy to stop if that's what Steve and Alexis wanted, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_co...

This comment by spez is also interesting https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_th...

It seems AS was given the title of co-founder by contract, but perhaps, the language was vague enough or they didn't fear retaliation so Steve and Alexis decided they didn't want to acknowledge him as co-founder.

Edit: here are some more details: https://observer.com/2011/07/rumors-acquisitions-did-reddit-... including comments by PG.

From Alexis Ohanian interview in 2006:

> Paul wanted to give Aaron Swartz, another YC founder, a birthday gift in November. More than anything else, Aaron wanted co-founder so Paul suggested the “merger”. Merger is probably a bit hyperbolic for what actually happened, Aaron basically moved in with us and we made him a co-founder.

> http://web.archive.org/web/20070823200504/http://startupstor...

As I recall, Aaron was doing his own startup through YC (Infogami).

Paul Graham introduced him to the Reddit guys and I believe suggested they merge Reddit and Infogami.

As part of that merger, Aaron gained the title "cofounder", IIRC.

This is backed up by comments in that Reddit thread, FWIW.

> I'd be happy to stop if that's what Steve and Alexis wanted, though.

Seems like they do, now.

Yeah, I think it's accurate to say "Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends."

But some acknowledgement of the other early people, including Aaron Swartz (who I believe was nominally considered a co-founder), might've been appropriate.

What was the context of the graphic to which some people are objecting?

In that context, is the most important story what two people did alone initially (or with the help of YC and others)? Or the eventual cofounders of record? Or everyone who was influential/formative/contributor to a given milestone of Reddit? I don't know.

I found an Observer article[1] from 2011 that gives some more insight. It looks to me that Aaron could indeed be considered a Reddit co-founder. However, Huffman and Ohanian may have felt threatened by being associated to the criminal later on, so they went with a new narrative.

[1]: https://observer.com/2011/07/rumors-acquisitions-did-reddit-...

Every time this comes up, they have always been pretty clear that they felt he didn’t earn his spot and was MIA for most of the early work. So he joined after they started reddit, making him not a cofounder, and he abdicated his responsibilities after joining and being told by PG to give him a cofounder title, which they weren’t in a great position to decline. It’s hard to set the record straight here without denigrating someone, so they were always in an awkward position when this came up.

I don’t know anyone involved, but that’s the impression I got after seeing this topic beat to death on HN and reddit over the last 10ish years.

I doubt they cared at all that he was charged years after he left.

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