definitely just a musicianwhile reddit burns, let’s pay a tribute to Aaron Swartz, the brilliant co-founder that co-developed RSS, the technology that made reddit what it was and the technology that will power whatever lives on long after it is gone.
Shoq 🌿@tychi@merveilles. Maybe @davew can shed more light, but it was my understanding, that while he made several contributions, Swartz was not a “co-founder” or even really a co-developer” of RSS. He contributed some to the W3C Dev working group (with many others) in the creation of RSS and later co-wrote the RSS 1.0 spec, building on the prior art. I’m not trying to throw shade on anything he did do, but I just don’t like sweeping credit given anyone without substantial evidence I’ve never seen.
Riley@shoq "the brilliant co-founder [of Reddit] that [was a major contributor to] RSS" would be a far better way to word it
(Edit: autocorrect)
@rileytaylor But alas, that too is apocryphal. Swartz was not a co-founder of Reddit either. He was assimilated by Reddit.
Again, I’m not trying to diminish Swartz’s memory. I just believe that facts matter.
@shoq Fair point. Ownership and whether someone was actually a founder are often conflated. I mostly wanted to clarify that I didn't think the OP meant to say he co-founded RSS, since apocryphal or not, that's not the story.
He was originally called a co-founder by Ohanian after the merger. The reduction of title is something that has been negotiated by Ohanian more recently https://web.archive.org/web/20070823200504/http://startupstories.com/2006/11/29/passion-for-your-users-will-come-back-alexis-ohanian-co-founder-of-reddit/
Dave Winer ☕️@shoq -- there was a lot of confusion about what RSS was until RSS 2.0 came out and the NYT adopted it. There was a thread based on RDF, and Aaron was credited as a contributor to that. I would ask those people what he did, I never worked with him. I saw some of his posts on their mail list and met him a few times at conferences. He was a very precocious young person, obviously very smart, but he didn't seem interested in what I was working on. That's about it.