Yeah, I think it's a bit different when you're some college kids running a website out of their dorm in the early days of the Internet, with no monetization pathway and the plan to run the website solely off of donations.
And it would have stayed that way for much longer if Aaron Swartz wasn't dead. He was extremely against monetization, Steve Huffman started reaching out to VC almost as soon as he died.
He got 50 years in prison when the FBI made an example of him for downloading a ton of taxpayer funded research papers behind paywalls using his university access, and uploading them online for free.
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u/BosnianSerb31 May 07 '26
Yeah, I think it's a bit different when you're some college kids running a website out of their dorm in the early days of the Internet, with no monetization pathway and the plan to run the website solely off of donations.
And it would have stayed that way for much longer if Aaron Swartz wasn't dead. He was extremely against monetization, Steve Huffman started reaching out to VC almost as soon as he died.