Swartz wasn’t involved in the origins of Reddit. He got involved when Y Combinator combined his company with Reddit (something along those lines?). He was not an actual founder, just an early influencer. In many ways, decoupling him from the shitshow that Ohanian and Huffman have engendered is a good thing.

This is very similar to the argument of Musk being a founder of Tesla.

Also Swartz had a section of his homepage defending child pornography as "not necessarily abuse" and that possession & distribution of it should be a first amendment right. He also advocated for a violent overthrow of the US government. Here's a cache of one instance of him defending it. Aaron did some really great tech stuff, but he's not a person that should be regarded as some hero as he had a lot of views that were misguided at best.

What. The actual. Fuck. This guy is comparing peas to pies.

Imagine wanting to legalize that shit because "We don't arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.". Can't he imagine what would happen if we legalized that shit?

I think someone needs to get their hard drives examined.

The feds did come after him for other computer crimes (unrelated to those views) and he hung himself and investigation into him stopped at that point.

Eh, didn't know the full story behind him (or even that he hung himself for that matter).

I'm not gonna pretend to have sympathy for him if he was guilty of possessing the stuff that he was advocating for.

He was a big fan of freedom of speech of all kinds. That doesn't in any way suggest he possessed child porn. Read the entire page and it becomes quite clear that he is literally just listing laws that make certain kinds of data illegal.

I strongly disagree that CSAM should be legal, but the point that honest people have their lives ruined by being accused of possessing it, or by having normal images of their children, is certainly true.