It could make for a good Black Mirror episode. Two awkward people buy AI glasses and supposedly fall in love with each other, but they're always just going along with what the AI tells them to say. They end up both saying they have shared interests that they actually hate and while they're with their dream romantic interest they had before dating, their whole lives are miserable. Finally in advanced age one is dying and can't wear the glasses. For the first time in their relationship they're honest, and the two discover that they actually share their real interests and have tons of things in common. However, for fear being rejected they both spent their whole lives miserable with each other instead of having a potentially perfect life together if only one of them had ever taken the glasses off.

I'm not saying Aaron was 100% bad, my point is that I don't really think he's some modern-day hero either. And I've already replied to someone that dismissed the his child porn views as a forgotten childhood comment. It wasn't merely a poorly thought out comment he made at 16 and forgot about, he maintained and edited that page until his death, even restoring it after a server crash deleted it.

If you want to celebrate his tech contributions or his views on scientific piracy I'm all for it. I just don't agree with this view of him getting spread that he's some hero co-founder of Reddit that is being unfairly erased from history when that's inaccurate at best. He's just a dude that did some great things, had some great views, had some really really shit views, and never gave a shit about reddit.

That archive date I linked is from shortly after his death. If you go through the various archive dates you can see that he made changes to the page over the years. He added the bit about wanting a violent overthrow of the government when he was 18 or 19. In 2007 when he would have been 21, the archive just shows a note that he had a server crash and the site is gone but you can email him if you want a copy of it. By the time he was 22 he'd put the site back online. He made more edits visible through the following years until his death. So yeah we don't know his thoughts but we do he continued to maintain that page, even choosing to restore it after a server crash, until the point he killed himself. It's not as though it's an online post he made as a kid and forgot about.

If you're only interested in topics then switching from another social network to fediverse isn't so bad. But a lot of the twitter userbase is there because they want to follow people not topics. If you're into journalism all the journalists are there. If you're in the art world all the artists are there. Prior to musk it was easy to know that you were following who you thought you were. And the value is in that group of people all being there.

It's like how it's not a big deal for me that I quit reddit to come here, but I still have to maintain a Facebook and LinkedIn presence for my career. I can't (yet, anyways) tell people I meet at conferences to look me up on fediverse and then have to explain what that is and how it works and make sure they follow the right account name from the right instance.

People wouldn't accept Google Glasses and they were at least well designed for what they were. There's several new groups trying to sell glasses like this now but they seem to just be hopping on the AI bandwagon hoping for VC I figure. Imagine going on a first date with someone and they got that weird clunky camera thing clipped onto their glasses filming you the whole date. If you already had enough trouble with conversation on your own I don't see how adding awkwardness to the mix is going to help you at all.

What's it tell you to say to explain the weird ass glasses on your face? lol

I've seen several of these projects in the past couple weeks. If the public wouldn't accept google glasses and thought they were too invasive who is going to be receptive to these types of glasses that look absolutely ridiculous?

They've been testing disabling the mobile site for a few months now. They were A/B testing on accounts and not letting them log in from mobile browsers for a awhile now. I don't expect it'll be long before they try to block all mobile devices from accessing their website except through their stupid app.

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.

Yes that's what I why I asked you to state more simply for me.

I'd say you can read Aaron's own defense of child porn on his website and draw your own conclusions. If you're trying to suggest that I'm somehow defending Ohanian and Huffman, far from it. I can think Swartz shouldn't be considered a modern folk hero and still not like the other two.

Huffman was a mod for the jailbait subreddit.

Here's an interview with Ohanian after CNN reported on the jailbait subreddit which caused Reddit to close it down. Alexis blames CNN for "making up jibber jabber" and the children who allowed images of their abuse to be posted online.

This type of view was apparently support by all the original Reddit folks, just because Swartz has a better reputation now doesn't mean he didn't also share those views.

You're gonna have to dumb it down for me as I'm not sure what you mean by this in relation to this discussion.

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.