Aaron Swartz departs Reddit

Aaron Swartz, who had become a Reddit co-owner through the 2005 Infogami merger, left the company in early 2007, only months after its acquisition by Condé Nast. Having moved to San Francisco with the team, Swartz found corporate office life uncongenial; accounts vary, with some sources stating he was asked to resign in January 2007 and others describing his exit as a firing for undisclosed reasons. His departure ended the founding-era technical leadership, as Swartz had been central to rewriting Reddit's software in Python using his web.py framework.

Swartz went on to become an influential programmer and open-internet activist, contributing to the development of RSS, the Creative Commons technical architecture, and the Markdown specification. In 2011 he was arrested and later charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after mass-downloading academic articles from JSTOR via the MIT network; he faced multiple felony counts. Facing trial, Swartz died by suicide on January 11, 2013, at age 26, and the prosecution was dismissed. His case prompted lasting debate over computer-crime law and prosecutorial overreach.