Remember when Spez said it was “It’s time we grow up and behave like an adult company”? Apparently, that means paying himself $193 million and single-handedly tanking Reddit’s profitability right b…::undefined

  • Radical Dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2314·
    8 months ago

    The myth of Aaron Swartz continues…

    He was a big proponent of free speech absolutism. He’d have been more than happy with the jailbait subs, watchpeopledie, fatpeoplehate etc. I really don’t think he deserves a free pass just because Reddit wasn’t enshittifying while he was around, as it was in a growth phase. It had other problems which needed resolution.

    • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
      23·
      8 months ago

      I can see where he picked up that attitude. It was common in the hacker types of the late 90s/early 2000s regardless of where their politics lay otherwise. Around the time he died, many of them were starting to see the monster that was created out of that, but it wasn’t really obvious until the 2016 election.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      9·
      8 months ago

      https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/

      Share Child Pornography

      In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.

      This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      WPD has it’s place and there was nowhere on the internet that was nearly as sanitized as it was on reddit compared to other gore sites.

      That morbid curiosity in my twenties helped me through a lot.

      • Radical Dog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        I guess it’s the one I care least about that I listed. Substitute in the overtly racist subreddits, if you wish, as they surely didn’t deserve a platform.

    • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      You have to admit that comparatively he was the least rotten apple in that basket though.