

Script Clones of Popular Websites - nreece
http://www.scriptcopy.com/

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antirez
My experience with Oknotizie.alice.it (first Italian reddit-alike site with 2
Millions unique users for month) is that clones suck. Since we started more
than one year ago we saw an incredible number of clones using pligg, php-dug,
and so on, but nobody was able to take even the 5% of the italian market from
us, because it's a matter of quality, user experience, strong algorithms to
prevent spam (usually the algorithms implemented in the clones are very
trivial and easy to break).

Also clones are always not uptodate with features, for example Oknotizie
exactly like reddit entered the beta testing stage of "subreddits" (called
"groups" on our system) one week ago, probably today we will open the feature
to the public. Clones will implement this things later I guess.

It's a bad idea to start from already written code if you are starting a
startup.

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thomasfl
It's really great to be able to read the source code of a digg clone, to see
how the rating algorithms work, instead of reverse engineering it yourself.

Normally I prefer writing my own ruby or java code, than modify some elses php
hacks^^H^H^H^H^code.

~~~
nreece
Plenty of open source clones of Digg like pligg, php-dug etc.

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kxhoopshooter
Wow, they are actually charging money for this stuff too.

While there is a good point to be said of using pre-made scripts (if you think
you can make it better), I believe most good programmers at startups actually
want to code their own stuff so the idea of script clones will really turn
them off.

If all you know how to do is play with templates then you're not a very good
programmer. Creating scripts from scratch takes real skill.

