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Nobody really mentioned him at all in relation to reddit until about 4-5 years ago
That's just objectively false. He was mentioned on reddit frequently prior to his suicide, which was a very big deal at the time.
Idk man I was on Reddit basically since it 1 or 2 years in and felt like no one really knew about him who wasn’t there in the first 2-4 years or wasn’t around when he died. He was not a well known figure and as important as he was for reddit’s early trajectory, he wasn’t there for long. Less than a year if memory serves. Again he was important, but the windows of time for people to learn of him were small and the site was smaller.
He was well known, yes, but for other things - he was rarely mentioned in relation to working on or helping to create reddit. The idea that he basically founded reddit seems to be something that people decided 3-4 years ago.
He's become a zombie mascot for dissing reddit.
He rewrote the backend of Reddit, how is that not a big part?
He had a major role in the creation of reddit, yes. However, it’s become a thing to act as if he founded it by himself and the current CEO refuses to give him credit. While he worked with them very early on, Swartz wasn’t an original founder of reddit.