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Comment by mass_and_energy | Hacker News Reader

I'm disappointed in HN for stomping this person for the game that they made. They had no idea Threes existed, made this game as an experiment, and it went viral. Despite this, they still acknowledge Threes on their site.

But they post here and are dogpiled on by people saying they ripped off another game and should feel like a scumbag. That's wrong, let's be kind to each other instead of exhibiting rude behavior that discourages people from pursuing their projects because "it's a ripoff of xyz". This started as an experiment, and is now this person's full time career. Can we instead encourage others to follow?

We're not talking about a 1:1 ripoff, we're talking about a game whose gameplay is adjacent to another game. Is Call of Duty a rip-off of Medal of Honor because they're both WWII FPS games?

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HN isn't a person—it's a statistical cloud. There is always a spectrum of opinion. Most of the comments here agree with you.

There are some bilious and excessive responses but that's inevitable when a thread is large. We do our best to moderate the site so that they don't dominate.

People commonly overgeneralize-then-anthropomorphize the data points that rub them the wrong way. There are cognitive biases that we all have which make this an easy trap to fall into ([1], [2], [3]), but it's important that we all try to avoid it.

If you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) allow the negative tail of the spectrum to form your picture of the community, that's bad—because your picture of the community influences how you participate in it and this will cause harmful secondary effects that can, in the worst case, turn into doom loops.

I don't think the primary harmful effects (e.g. bilious comments and upvotes for indignation) of running a large internet forum like HN are avoidable, but I do think the secondary ones are. At least I hope so!

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

"They had no idea Threes existed" This makes it even worse, because it means they ripped off 1024 instead (the game that ripped off Threes). That means they put even less effort into their clone, even the name is a rip off of that game.

I genuinely don't get how people here can say "Oh it's just like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor" or say that Triple Town and Threes were similar. Obviously there's a spectrum from inspiration to cloning, but 2048 is so far on the cloning end of that spectrum that the whole comparison seems like a joke.

I think 2048 is a better game and I like it more.

Especially when other merge games (Triple Town) existed for years.

They're all in the same general genre.

>Especially when other merge games (Triple Town) existed for years.

That matt guy that's posted like 100 times in this thread doesn't want to hear it, but I've literally only ever heard Threes brought up in comparison to 2048 and Triple Town. No one brings up Threes on their own organically.

where is the stomping happening? i think everyone here knows the score, and both teams have points.

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