The Standard Needs to Improve Its Standards for Fact-Checking, Aaron Swartz Had Nothing to Do With Reddit and He Detested the Company That Created It

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 10, 2025,
updated Feb 10, 2025

He did not co-found Reddit, but Conde Nast (or Condé Nast, aka Condé Nasty) is falsely claiming that he did

They even write Internet with a small "i"...

We've already said it many times before: Reddit and the malicious company (Conde Nast) that controls it (and works for Microsoft) lie about Swartz, trying to posthumously squeeze his corpse for some "goodwill points".

If we value facts and oppose false credit, then we need to stop misinformation (or disinformation in the case of Reddit) from spreading online, mistaking people with "authoritative" sources which are basically self-serving marketing.

There is this new article in San Francisco's The Standard. Zara Stone said 2 days ago that Swartz "co-founded Reddit", but this is simply untrue. The lie from Conde Nast is still being spread because people don't bother to challenge it and instead simply assume it's true and probably some "hidden knowledge".

A simple fact-checking process would catch this error. Quoting Swartz's own blog about his short time at Conde Nast: "The first day I showed up here, I simply couldnt take it. By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying."

He did not stay there. He did not make Reddit. He ended up walking away from that job and he started doing all sorts of other stuff until he died (because he had been repeatedly blackmailed).

Swartz didn't keep abreast of Reddit; he was busy doing his own stuff, as multitasking is the last thing people like him need. Towards his last year he researched how to make information more accessible to more people, i.e. the very opposite of what Reddit and Conde Nast do.

Will the lie about Reddit's origin ever die? Back when I was very active in digg.com and Reddit emerged as a rival^* they said Reddit was kind of a Swartz thing, looking to exploit his work on RSS to legitimise Reddit as an early form of social control media or a "pioneer" or some kind. Reddit was a copycat - a poor one at that.

Someone affirms our recollection about Swartz - insisting that he did help establish RSS; I myself remember this well, as a very early and avid adopter of news feeds. There's no disputing which men started it and how the specs evolved^**.

Back then Swartz could respond to the lie; he was still alive but VERY young, so maybe he didn't even notice the lie...

Sometimes you must wait for a powerless person to die to lie about him/her. Sometimes you must wait for a powerful person to die to say the truth about him/her; Aaron Swartz is in the first group, Bill Esptein Gates in the second.

Those who relayed the lie (almost 2 decades ago!) are confusing those who write about Swartz this month - more than 12 years after his death. Once an error gets into the news files, an associate opines, it is very hard to eradicate. It's just presumed to have been fact-checked and thus no "citation [is] needed" anymore (to a primary sources such as Swartz's own blog^***).

This old lie about Reddit and Swartz may never die entirely, but correcting it when possible is still imperative. The Web is already bad enough as it is. LLM slop is likely spreading the lies (revisionism) from Reddit already; Reddit is already heavily censored to accomplished the "desirable" (to advertisers) bias sans last-minute slave labour in Africa (biasing LLMs 'by hand'). █

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^* In Digg I was ranked 17^th - that's in the entire site! And before phones had "apps" and the term "influencer" existed sites like Digg and Slashdot could induce load spikes on sites they linked to, taking them offline within minutes if not seconds.

^** He also contributed towards other technologies adopted by modern content management systems, e.g. atx Structured Text and Markdown:

He helped defeat SOPA and PIPA through founding Demand Progress and was a proponent of Open Access, which is what he ended up dying for. The famous movie about it, "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz", has turned 11. I watched it several times (sometimes with friends or with the wife). The Internet Archive has this public copy. "It is notable that the YouTube copies are censored behind logins and not generally accessible to the public at large," someone notes. The BBC stopped making it available: (because taking bribes from Bill Gates and running ads/reputation-laundering fluff for Gates in the front page of the BBC's Web site is far more important)

No bandwidth for this, but endless capacity for perception management around Gates. That's why there will be many more layoffs at the BBC. Journalists cannot do their job there anymore; they have marketing on the agenda. The sponsors, who aren't even British, call the shots.

^*** Tracing back the lie backwards in peculiar and over-a-decade-long time wormholes, a reputable university said "RSS Creator and Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz dead at 26" in Harvard Magazine. On the same month CNN said "Aaron Swartz helped build the Internet" (they probably meant World Wide Web) and an associate asserts that those two articles do nothing regarding the lie, either way. A lot of sites started out by soft-pedalling his departure. That seems to have morphed, with the help of lies, into a myth based on falsehoods. The associate recalls about Swartz that he was in a company which got bought out by Conde Nast and quit as a result.

Swartz could have survived; if only he hadn't done work in the public interest...

No good deed goes unpunished.