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Reddit founder Aaron Swartz found dead in suicide at Brooklyn apartment

The Internet genius behind the popular Web site Reddit.com committed suicide at his Brooklyn home, police sources and friends said.

Cops found Aaron Swartz, 26, unconscious at 9:30 a.m. Friday in the bedroom of his Sullivan Place apartment building in Crown Heights, law-enforcement sources said.

He had used a belt to hang himself and left no note, the sources added.

Swartz helped create Reddit and drafted an early version of the RSS format, a Web feed that syndicates frequently updated online work, including news, blogs and audio.

Dubbed “Rich Site Summary,” it gives users one accessible place to find fresh content.

“We are in shock and have not yet come to terms with his passing,” Swartz’s his family said yesterday in a statement.

Friends recalled Swartz as a prolific intellectual and a computer-geek legend who had long suffered from depression.

In 2007, he wrote online: “You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you.”

He often blogged about his suicidal thoughts and physical illness, including chronic stomach pain and migraines.

“You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none,” he wrote.

But even in sickness, friends said, he remained curious about the world.

“Aaron’s mind was a wonderful thing to get to encounter,” friend Alyssa Rosenberg wrote on ThinkProgress.org.

Swartz was an activist who pushed to make Web files open to the public. That mind-set got him into trouble in July 2011, when he was indicted on fraud charges for allegedly illegally downloading academic journals on the subscription-only Web site JSTOR.com.

The feds claimed that he slipped into a restricted area on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus and accessed the school’s computer network under a false account.

He pleaded not guilty — but the case remains open.

In their statement, relatives blamed MIT and the federal government for the young genius’ demise.

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” they wrote. “It is the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

As a kid, Swartz followed in the footsteps of his father, the founder of a software company. Swartz began programming computers seriously at age 14 in San Francisco and later attended Stanford University.

He dropped out after a year and founded the software start-up Infogami. He next launched DemandProgress.com, which encourages tech-based activism.

But not all of his passions were orthodox. He openly opposed the pending Stop Online Piracy Act, legislation that fights hackers who swipe music and movies.

Condé Nast purchased the social-news and entertainment site Reddit in 2006.

Additional reporting by Daniel Prendergast