Stealing Is a Skill

I went to the Mintlify page they copied.

Don’t actually know what the product is and why it might be valuable to me.

Sure is pretty though.

Really love the "eye-grabbing top fold"

::looks at bootstrap hero styling::

Oh, right.

Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.

A bit tough to say this, but transformers are trained the same way.

This also works in drawing and painting. One of my painting teachers used to admonish us: "copy, copy, copy".

This was my first thought as well. Hunter S. Thompson used to copy Hemingway by hand to internalize his cadence.

Obligatory link to a relevant Jorge Luis Borges story: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (about an author who copied Don Quixote word for word)

https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...

i have a vague memory of hunter s thompson talking about sitting down and typing out the great gatsby to see how it would feel to write a great american novel

A good example of why this is true I see in my bubble is in Indie tabletop RPGs. Fairly regularly if you follow indie rpg websites and forums, you get the following "I am sick of how Dungeons and Dragons does X so I made a new system". They will then proceed to describe Dungeons and Dragons but with some half-baked idea that is already done in some other game. So you might say "Hey this is already done in Traveller". But the people who have extremely little exposure to the field, and have only ever played one game (D&D typically) ends up re-exploring the field with "new ideas" that have existed for decades and have already been iterated upon.

there is negative stealing or avoiding mistakes done by others. as propounded by Warren Buffet and others. and epitomized by philosophy of being less wrong.

And then, if you are great, you will steal not from one thing but from everything

I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg

Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/

If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.

https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html

I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.

Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together.

As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?

The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.

I thought the same at first, but they are copying somebody's old and retired design, ie the other company doesn't use that design anymore.

I agree. In fact, it's even worse: often times you miss the tradeoffs.

With Software in particular, I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.

If recreating someone else's creation truly learned us, I believe the world would be a tremendously better place.

I used to run a lunch study group where we took some old crusty load bearing software, read the documentation thoroughly, and then dissected it, reading source and comments and trying to distill what it achieved well separate from what it achieved in spite of itself.

We learned a lot.

When people finally offload 100% of their brain and forget how to use their creative reasoning abilities my guess is we’ll just all use Tailwind defaults across the board. No need to try new things, nobody will experiment because it’s so easy not to!

(Joking, mostly) but we did see this with Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc. the masses converge on simple web experiences because it’s pretty easy to get something that “just works”.

Even if not, it's really, really distasteful

I don't think this is the same kind of stealing?

If you're being a great artist who steals you may perfectly reproduce something, but in such a different and novel context that it feels fresh, or taking something verbatim and then modifying it with your work, vs say taking an series of ideas from a work and then not really changing or moving from what they were originally expressing

An example of this is from Offworld Trading Company[0], which literally started by copying the market from Age of Empires[1] and then iterated on it as well as the auction mechanics from MULE[2], I vaguely recall them talking about this in their GDC talk[3], though I could be misremembering that(it's a good talk though)

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if anyone who was stolen from in those cases feels hurt by it

Compare that to stealing, where the parties stolen from were really quite angry at what was stolen, Triple Town vs Yeti Town[4], which very much looked like a lazy clone

-[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/Offworld_Trading_C...

-[1]: https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Market_(Age_of_Empires_...

-[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.

-[3]: Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2C4z_apu2I

-[4]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/spry-fox-and-the-clone-wars

I'm a big fan of that quote, but always took it differently than the meaning associated with this article.

Good artists see an idea and use it. Great artists see an idea and _make it their own_.

there are only limited number of patterns for ui,ux, CTA. It sucks to be stolen from, but we build on top of each other most of the time

I think the author's choice of words is framing the discussion. They did build their own website, but they loved the look of the one they saw, so I'd think a better choice would be "inspired by" rather than "stolen from."

I agree. It's telling that they picked such a boring and generic design to steal.

Yeah, this is kinda crazy. This isn't stealing some ideas, their website is a printscreen of the original with some colors shifted. I doubt this is even legal.

No, that's just copyright infringement. It's stealing when the stolen thing is no longer accessible to the previous owner.

Consensus differs on whether both, or just one, is morally objectionable. Conflating them is problematic.

There is something of a tradition in the design world to use theft-shaped words for things we collect for inspiration/ideas. A piece of advice I followed in the 80s and 90s when paper was still a thing was to have a "Swipe File," which was a collection of things you saw and liked, on paper.

In my own case as a designer of desktop apps, my Swipe File was not just digital screen shots of parts of apps that I admired, but I physically printed them out as well so I could spread them on a desk, floor, and walls when brainstorming.

That word "Swipe" also inspired the name of a design store catering to creative professionals in my home town, Toronto:

https://www.swipe.com/about

the very point is that theft means you no longer have something since someone else has. copying is you still have it and someone else now too. there is no harm done by copying, except you actually believe that exclusivity as a separate concept is important to you. (debatable, I don't).

> fetishize, herbicide and normalize

I’m very curious what “herbicide” was an auto-complete for here…