Reddit’s founders seem to be pretty spineless for doing so. I didn’t even realise that they removed him..
Not unlike most orgs I suppose.
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.
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.
To be scupulously fair, "never hold the line, especially if it would be costly to do so", is still a principle by that definition, albeit a vacuous one. Just like "zero" is a number of apples you can be holding.
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.
> 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..
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.
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.
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.
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.