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Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21

techcrunch.com

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Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21

#4

Post by ksharp »

I'm reminded of Gene Kan, but I am unsure if the circumstances are similar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kan

The similarities are that there was considerable press coverage of Diaspora and that they seemed, at least to me, destined to fail mostly just because it was a hard thing to do given their structure. It is a true shame that this individual took the failure personally as it wasn't at all his fault, again it was primarily structural in my opinion. Gene Kan I understand was somewhat susceptible for other reasons to depression.

Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21

#9

Post by parfe »

What purpose do stories like this serve? People consider asking for details to be rude. Other than tabloid style storytelling drama, why else should strangers care?

This man died young, but so did the local 19 year old young woman killed just after midnight by a driver just after she rescued an injured dog from the road.

You can already see someone saying the cause of death does not matter, but why does this death announcement matter?

edit: Poster removed his admonishment regarding questions about the cause of death.

People close to this person obviously will suffer due to their loss, but his death announcement gets posted here in some sort of limbo where no one (or very few) knew him. But we must respond with condolences to people we don't know about a person we only know though his involvement in a web application.

edit2: Twitter messages directed at the deceased indicate suicide.

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