imitation as inspiration
Inspired by Becky's Feelings on Imitation & Plagiarism.
I welcome fellow creatives ripping or remixing my CSS, layout, navigation, and text for their own purposes.
For example, take my Agave theme for Bear Blog. Perfect ripping it inspired imperfect makes perfect. Roda remixing it inspired remix others' themes. Starlight remixing it inspired luddites shill machines. Them showcasing how much they liked my design fueled my own creative drive. Hopefully my posts returned their favors. If you share their fondness, can you help us out by perpetuating this cycle? How can others help perpetuate the cycle for your own creations?
Even small homages can feel gratifying with or without credit. Check out how David's blog reuses my theme's link hover animations. Now, consider how my theme reuses parts of others' themes as described in agave theme details. I tried my best to give credit where possible. Yet, it's almost certain that many of its influences remain undocumented, whether intentionally or not. I would expect that the vast majority of themes fall into that bucket. Given the sheer complexity of human exchange, how all-encompassing can credit be anyhow?
People don't need AI access to copy your content. Text from many blog pages can easily be manually copy-pasted or rewritten. Perfect's About page says you can just copy any blog's CSS theme by using the Inspect Element tool in your browser. Consider how people who engage in this behavior syndicate your ideas and yourself beyond your reach. Whether intentional or not, what novel value, connections, or other mutual rewards could arise from them propagating your work?
See how Matt treated imitation as inspiration in Congrats if you've found this:
Thanks to the incredible Nate Meyvis for unintentionally and unwittingly showing me this publishing platform, and for being a model of how to use it. I stole my home page template from him, too.