Corporation rears its ugly head on Reddit co-founder
By corporation, I don’t necessarily mean Wired, or Conde Nast. If you read the interview with Aaron Swartz, Reddit co-founder who was laid off (seemingly without a well-defined reason) from Reddit a couple of months ago, he is resentful, but he doesn’t seem to blame his employers all that much. It looks more likely that the corporate kind of life wore him down little by little, until he started coming in late, or not showing up at all, which is probably high on the list of reasons for him getting fired.
The interview itself is quite interesting, but there are two important things to be learned from this.
1. Getting bought by a BigCo might not always have a happy ending.
2. You can’t hide your dirty laundry from social media, even if you own it. The link to the interview with Aaron is currently the top link on Reddit (screenshot below).
May 8th, 2007 at 2:59 am
I don’t know if the description of Aaron as a ‘co-founder’ is accurate. I read quite a bit about the whole situation after reading the interview on Google Blogoscoped.
I think this quote sums it up well (from reddit comments)
“I’m pretty sure the story of pre-YC reddit is that Steve and Alexis were interviewing by themselves, and almost got rejected, but then came back. Aaron also entered the program separately, trying to found Infogami. He then merged with Reddit in November. WTF, man?”
May 8th, 2007 at 4:09 am
@Aaron: I based it on the following excerpt from the interview:
“There were three founders – me, Steve, and Alexis.”
But, there are always several sides to every story. Thanks for pointing it out.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Yeah I had made the same assumption until I read Aaron’s own explanation of how he joined reddit in a ‘merger’ Which to me means that reddit was already established and therefore he couldn’t be a co-founder.
You can read the explanation from Aaron Swartz here: http://infogami.com/blog/introduction
July 14th, 2009 at 3:28 am
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January 18th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Great comment, love the design of the site too.
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