It's weird to see Aaron Swartz evoked as some sort of martyr vis a vis Reddit. (You're not the first person to do it.)
As I understand, he basically lucked out when his thing crashed and YC asked Reddit to make him part of the founding team. Was he ever a significant part of Reddit?
Considering he was a major force driving the rewrite of Reddit from Lisp (the version that HN is based on currently) to Python, adding features like Markdown support (a language he helped create in 2002), Aaron defined major parts of the site that have persisted across multiple rewrites of Reddit's codebase.
Hacker News is written in arc. The first reddit was written in Common Lisp. clisp, specifically, I believe.
Aaron convinced them to do it in his web.py and it was rewritten in a weekend (or so the story went). Later, it was written in Pylons and open sourced. No idea these days.
This was pretty common back then even for extremely complicated (for the time) sites (graybeard here). FCGI rewarded having a single huge application that would gradually leak memory over the course of the day until you told the intern to bounce the service when certain red lights started going off too frequently.
I had the same impression as you until I listened to a podcast with Steve Huffmann about the early days of Reddit. For some time, he and Aaron worked quite intensively on the site. From the podcast, it rather appeared that they had different visions about the site. Aaron wanted to build a very different kind of community and experience. When Reddit started to become successful, there was less and less time to work on these „visions“ until he lost interest and basically left the team.
As I understand, he basically lucked out when his thing crashed and YC asked Reddit to make him part of the founding team. Was he ever a significant part of Reddit?