this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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When you design and run a platform, it is your responsibility.
If you design the platform to allow anyone to "create a morally objectionable community and then associate it with anyone else", you are responsible for this oversight.
It's not like spez took that responsibility and reacted accordingly. He didn't care, didn't change anything, and the simple fact that he could have fixed it in a matter of hours but chose not to is complicit enough to admit wilful association.
So, in my book, for all intent and purposes, him not doing anything with that mod access is irrelevant. What is relevant is him not doing anything about that mod access.
I'm sure spez was responsible for that design decision or oversight, but he left the company in 2009 and did not return until 2015. User-created subreddits were still a pretty new feature when he left and I don't think that form of abuse had caught on at the time.
There's plenty to complain about spez is actually responsible for, but it's Hueypriest or yishan you want for the time period we're talking about.
I'll have to admit that I'm pretty unknowledgeable about the reddit history.
I was even unaware that spez left the company, all I know ~~was that it is based on an original idea from Aaron Swartz~~[^1], and that it's a damn shame he was "made an example of" by the American establishment, only for daring opposing to their "values" of "knowledge is only for the powerful".
If only they had left him alone, or had enforced a punishment on par with his "fault", he would still be alive, and we would have likely have seen a ton of extremely cool innovations from him.
[^1]: I checked the information after writing this, and it turns out, at least according to Wikipedia, to be false: reddit was in fact founded by spez and Alexis Ohanian, in 2005, and Swartz joined via a merger, in 2006. However, this goes against what Swartz himself said in an interview:
"I was with the Reddit team back when we were coming up with the idea, in the months before the first Y Combinator Summer Founders Program started. We eventually began working together full time around that November [2005]".
I was one of the first hundred or so people who didn't know the founders to make a reddit account. While I can't claim any deep insider knowledge, I was on the site and paying attention to developments. The idea that became reddit came from Paul Graham and was fundamentally a more social version of Delicious. What Arron Swartz was working on at the time was Infogami, which was pretty much a wiki, and became reddit's wiki when the companies merged.
His prosecution was certainly unjust and his suicide tragic, but I don't think either has anything to do with Reddit.
Oh fuck I didn't even notice your nick... you're u/Zak on reddit??
Also, nah, his prosecution had nothing to do with reddit, this was my mandatory "fuck the abusive intellectual property and its consequence on the life of the common people" plug. Sorry 'bout that.
I am.
It's funny, because when I was searching for the information, I found your post... so I guess I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and just asked you here... 😅