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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

> I built wikitok.io in about 2 hours (but not the iphone app that doesn't work, nor the play store rip off, nor wikitok.net but I'm getting ahead of myself). It all came from this tweet.

This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of "TikTok but it's Wikipedia". I see the author is OP, so my suggestion might be to consider rephrasing a bit as it comes off a bit accusatory.

I did try my hand on this project after seeing this bare-bones viral version. (I had the same idea in my notes app dated a couple years ago.) I went a different route, opting to pre-parse wikitext via my own API to deliver the app an AST that can be rendered natively & prettier than your standard Wikipedia page. Not a fun format to parse. Not fun at all. I don't recommend it. And it took significantly longer than 2 hours and was never released, so props to the author for turning this project around so fast.

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> This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of "TikTok but it's Wikipedia". I see the author is OP, so my suggestion might be to consider rephrasing a bit as it comes off a bit accusatory.

Am I missing something, it comes off as the precise opposite to me? OP wrote "I built X, but the idea came from this source" basically, acknowledging they built the thing but the idea came from somewhere else.

Some of them came before me, but most of them were clones that came after me. I just wanted to highlight what happens when you go viral - there will be copycats.

The point of that phrase was just to highlight the derivatives the I had no affiliation with.

I built it and marketed it, but the idea came from some tweets that were gaining momentum.

Oh I see. My apologies, my assumption was that you had wrote the tweet.

Maybe I should've made that a screenshot or embedded tweet, if you scroll over it / don't click on it you lose context. Realtime website UI feedback here.

> This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of "TikTok but it's Wikipedia".

The author is giving credit. Literally the opposite of your interpretation.

> I had the same idea in my notes app dated a couple years ago.

On the other hand this seems as if you now want to claim to be the inventor of the idea?

A mixture of both. Some of those were copycats and some of those came before me, (the iPhone app, but I didn't know about it when I made the website). The point I was making was there's lots of clones happening when you go viral.

Bizarre confabulation: the text you quote says nothing of the sort. They say the made one site, not to be confused with other, similar sites, and that the idea originates with someone else's tweet. Why jump to negative conclusions when they are sharing their project for the first time?

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