Not that I fault either designer. I think they've both taken previous work, improved upon it (or at least altered it), in some way before releasing it as their own. I suppose I have trouble feeling sorry for Dustin after reading he planned to open it up to those he thought worthy of its use.
I note Curtis also posted about the OMGPOP sale, the value of which is based on a game that is at its core a clone of a game that existed on the web over 5 years ago (which is probably a clone of another game from earlier). I wonder if he'd be similarly outraged knowing this. (I find it quite inspirational to know you can take an old concept and make millions modernizing it.)
Fact is, life gives you no guarantees about "fairness". You can try stacking the odds in your favor, e.g. don't announce your easily reproducible idea before you have a significant head-start over competitors. Relying on notions such as "fairness", "ethics", "class" etc., all based on personal beliefs, to protect your idea is quite simply naive. Somewhere out there will be somebody who subscribes to a different set of beliefs.
I'll take this one step further, and say that one of the reasons people attempt to be kind and pleasant and, you know, not a prick, is that people respect and like you and want to help and support you. I bet this thread wouldn't have happened/would've gone differently if Dustin's much-cherished "brand" didn't revolve around his being a dick.
I mean, he announces the platform and his intentions to make Svtble be the online equivalent of a newspaper but without all the bad parts, suggesting in the process that he doesn't have a clue how hard it is to be a good writer or even what newspapers do (hint: it's not all editorial). Then he markets his service as being somehow for the "elite" (read: "people who design pretty email apps") and when people complain about the tone his response is, "but it got a reaction and that's all I wanted I AM A MARKETING GENIUS".
If he'd even been a degree less douchey (say, announced Svtble as a "private beta" or said that he wanted to promote good writing without suggesting that a minimalist blogging platform was gonna change the world), then maybe nobody would have felt the need to insta-replicate his code, and if they had, they wouldn't be receiving the support they're receiving in this thread.
I know we geek types like to turn everything into statistics and easily-parsed data, and I know that "being a nice person" is a little bit tricker to analyze than "you should follow me on Twitter here", but I promise that there's a reason people try to be decent and nice, and it's not just that they're too weak to appreciate Ayn Rand.
This is an excellent point. If his goal was to get attention, he got it. What he didn't count on was that some of that attention would come from people who strongly didn't agree with his style, and the consequences thereof.
Completely agree, to protect your idea is quite simply naive and he could have replied differently. Dustin understands the product much better than the clone creator & he has nothing to lose. So the only thing he had to worry about was to grab positive attention.
In my opinion, if Dustin is showing off his thing with a key "feature" being "invitation only", then it seems open season for someone else to think "Fair enough, if you think curated bloggers is a key differentiating feature, then me launching a similar service _without_ that key feature seems OK".
In one sense - people seem to love having their ideas "validated" by new startups claiming "We're $existingThing for $newMarket". "We're HipMonk for dogs!" We're GoogleAnalytics for yoga retreats!" "We're Svbtle for non-celebrity-bloggers!"
What Dustin made is very nice. He may very well be able to curate bloggers in a way that makes it wildly successful - I hope he does, I'll cheer him on. Maybe though, Obtvse will gain a bigger or different userbase. Maybe someone wil be able to take the Obtvse codebase and do a better curating job than Dustin - with the right code ready to roll, I'd bet on Maria Popova or Cory Doctorow or Rob Malda or even Nick Denton to win at the blogger-curating role over Dustin…
It would be wrong if NateW hacked into and stole the source, or stole the design source/code of Dustin's project. But reproduction of someone else's work isn't ripping them off but is a compliment (it means that it's worth reproducing).
As good as Dustin is, neither his ideas or implementation of his blog/cms platform are that unique.
Follow that line and you will end up with two to three websites in the whole world of internet. He did not rip it off, in fact I see it as a favor for the original author, since its clearly stated that the second work is based on the first. If I release an HN simply for handful of people who I think are worthy of using it, then I should be dead ready for a crazy torrent of HN alternatives.
It's not a 1:1 clone. Put them side by side and you'll quickly see differences in font choice and size as well as positioning of several elements. I'm not saying it's not similar, but it's certainly not a clone.
And I'd like to think that being open-source is a huge feature of Ovbtuse, and something certainly worth noting when comparing the two.
Okay, perhaps not a 1:1 clone, but definitely a rip-off. Mr. Wienert posted examples of his other work in this thread, and I think it's safe to assume he wouldn't have come close to the Svbtle UI if left to his own devices.
Seriously? It's a two-column interface with extra heaps of whitespace and thick borders. Yeah, Obtvse imitates Svtble – that's the point. It's not like it was imitating anything especially unique or difficult to conceive.
I take it you haven't been on Hacker News for very long. I am a designer; one of my pet projects went viral after hitting the top of Hacker News. I've also closed a few blogs after my rants there hit the front page; it seemed to me that garnering hundreds of thousands of views for my eighteen-year-old hissy fits might not be the smartest way to make a name for myself.
Dustin's got a flare for minimalist design: he's good at making things simultaneously simple enough that you can grasp them and loud enough that they stand out. Sometimes I come close to admiring him, but he's so smug for so little reason that I can't appreciate him for his talents. Tim van Damme did the superhero thing first and with a tenth the ego; his http://timvandamme.com/ is better-made than anything Dustin's ever touched, spread further than anything Dustin's ever designed, and he never let it go to his head. He's also capable of designing a web site with more than five elements on it at once.
Simple is nice; elegant is better. Dustin seemingly doesn't aspire to elegance and he's content with simply being popular. I don't begrudge wanting popularity, it was hard for me to stop lusting after, but I do begrudge conflating "people like my style" with "I am a great person who makes great things". I love cocky artists, can't get enough of the Dadaists and Philippe Gaulier and jackass Zen tutors who smack you for saying stupid things; but it's got to be earned.
Dustin recently wrote a post that made the rounds which I admired because he seemed to be saying, "I'm not satisfied with how good I am; I want to be better, and do something worthwhile." He strikes me as a guy trying to do the right thing and going about it the wrong way, and I sympathize with him a whole lot. But his ego is hilarious and way out of proportion with the rest of his work, and I find it endlessly amusing how bad he is at handling criticism, endlessly irritating how certain he is that he doesn't deserve it.
Not to get too meta here, but unalone and I have continued this discussion in email, so I'm not going to bother with a large reply here. In short, I apologized for writing him off so quickly, but disagree with his assessment of Svbtle's elegance.
Well said. Most of the discussions are all about whether or not stealing designs is justifiable... and thats really missing the point. /btw welcome back unalone.
I don't see why. The linked site is a generic Apple style ripoff with an annoying and unnecessary swipe action. I've seen hundreds of sites just like it. Am I missing something?
I don't see the Apple part that you're talking about, but I think that he was the original one who did that, and others took inspiration from him. Or maybe I'm just delusional.
Well said. I can't wait until my side project (oops... startup... uh, I mean Rockstarium-ninjai fusion device) goes live and I get to satirize this trend with the site design (up until a point, probably the end of beta; at the end of the day I'm still trying to build a real service and a joke only goes so far). I may even be looking forward to this more than the end product.
https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1902246181/logo10.png
Not that I fault either designer. I think they've both taken previous work, improved upon it (or at least altered it), in some way before releasing it as their own. I suppose I have trouble feeling sorry for Dustin after reading he planned to open it up to those he thought worthy of its use.