j_c

I'm all for pushing boundaries, but this is a classic case of form over function.

PR / Marketing / Brand — All aspects of the cult of a personality.

Curtis' abilities surrounding marketing, PR and his brand has and will continue to drive this product. Not the technology.

Copycats can build the technology, but that's it. All the aspects of the product that have resulted it reaching the top of HackerNews are unfortunately a lot harder to reproduce.

There is no original thought here, the design and idea are identical, whether it's technically right or wrong, this shouldn't be encouraged.

Feel for you here dcurtis, and surprised people are actually behind this.

It'd be a shame to see such a beautifully simple feature that is the iconic 'Like' watered down by a stab-in-the-dark revenue model.

One problem is that your average designer will not know what versioning is, never mind have an opinion as to whether it'd be useful or not.

I see this as a case of applying a successful model from one field to another without consideration around whether this is actually a problem in the first place.

Andy Warhol produced numerous versions of his Campbell soup, in doing so he added some value in asking questions, if it was just one can of soup this wouldn't have been the case.

A can of soup doesn't equal a painting of a can of soup.

There are many differences.

I'm a designer (and developer, depending on the task).

Not the designer.

"But the posters are a sentence fragment in a standard font. They're not printing off bootleg copies of the Mona Lisa here."

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A 63-year-old Picasso got out his pen and paper and sketched the woman, who passing by had asked for a quick self-portrait of herself.

It took him 30 seconds, once finished, he asked for 500,000 US dollars.

'Why? It didn't even take you a minute!' she replied.

'Madam, that sketch took 63 years."

And off he walked, with the sketch in his pocket.

Do you not see this as immoral and disrespectful to the original artist?

Good artists copy, greats artists steal and make that they've stolen their own.

We are all influenced by the same things, it's what you do with that influence that matters.

"The Hacker Way" is no excuse to steal.

Your intentions are irrelevant. Unless somebody has clearly stated you can reproduce their creative work you shouldn't, nor should you want to.

Please do not use the guise of a 'hacker mentality' to mask your lazy and disrespectful actions.