Aaron Swartz Has Already Explained What Reddit/Conde Nast Meant to Him and Why We Should All Avoid Reddit If We Value Software Freedom
Aaron Swartz did not start Reddit and Conde Nast keeps lying about this posthumously. It exploits the dead for marketing (capital).
"That so many mistake Reddit for a discussion forum is a tragedy," an associate has noted in response to this quitting (good riddance), adding that we really should link to the Aaron Swartz blog post about it in the recent post.
For completeness we just want to remind readers how Mr. Swartz really felt at this company, in his own words: "We’ve been spared most of the brunt of it, but their IT policy is pretty scary. There’s a company Internet connection, which routes everything through the IT HQ in Delaware, presumably the better to spy on us on. On Day 1 they took our laptops and “backed up” the drives to ensure they had a copy of all our data. (We scurried to get our MP3 collections and worse off first.)"
Also: "The company laptop is necessary to read our company email which, being on a Microsoft Exchange server, requires a special Microsoft email client to read. You also need to be on a company laptop to access the company network, where you can log into a maze of PeopleSoft web sites to file expense reports and change your health benefits."
They brought him to tears: "By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying. I can’t imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day, let alone getting any actual work done."
Not tears of joy. █
Image source: Aaron Swartz