Ten Lines Of Code Is Easy; Building Community Is Hard
from the yup dept
Fred Wilson has a good post pointing out how ridiculous it is for various elitists to scoff at a certain internet startup because it could be recreated in "ten lines of code." I certainly know the feeling (and have, at times, felt it myself), but as Fred notes, the comment is really far off the mark, and is a situation where techies tend to be doing the same thing that content owners have been known to do: overvaluing one part of the product over what's likely to be even more important. While content owners overvalue the content itself, techies often overvalue the code. But with certain services, it's the community that's more important than the code. The fact that the code can be (and has been) replicated is meaningless, if you can't also create the same community around it.This is a point that's also important when it comes to the various discussions we have about patent law around here. Some patent system defenders insist that they need to "protect" their invention. But, again, if that invention isn't bringing users, there's not much worth protecting, at all. You can copy all you want, but if no one's willing to use what you do, you haven't done much valuable. Ten lines of code may be meaningless. But if those ten lines of code bring in millions of users, it's a different story.
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Filed Under: code, community, elitism, techies
Companies: bit.ly
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Ha! Another industry which can't think.
10 lines of code. Funny stuff. I think I'll patent those 10 lines of code and sue the entire world for using it.
Seems to be paying better than writing 10 lines of code.
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If you can write it, someone else can write is as well or better.
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True
I'm not a programmer, I'm a network security guy, but I had a professor once say that some in the programming community undervalued things like the community because of a psychological function of working with coding. He called it something like "the if/then social problem", or something like that. Basically, programmers became so used to the general rules of programming that they expected the community to behave like the program, i.e. if you give the girl a flower, she'll go on a date w/you, never mind all of the social interactions at work.
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Ten Lines of Code...
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If there's one thing that's abundant on the internet...
There's no point in writing a fast 2D line intersection algorithm in
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If there's one thing that's abundant on the internet... (cont.)
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If there's one thing that's abundant on the internet... (cont.)
NOTE: Apparently plain text mode still interprets html tags causing my post to be cut. Sorry bout the double posts.
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Value may have a time factor...
You can copy all you want, but if no one's willing to use what you do, you haven't done much valuable.
If no one is ever willing to use what you have done, then it is true that you may not have done much valuable. However, what happens if 30 years from now someone needs a solution and discovers your long-expired patent? Or, what if, as happens to about 2/3's of all patents, it expired by the 8 year mark, and someone wants that technology ten years after it was developed? Now the technology is not only valuable, but readily available.
Thomas Jefferson anticipated that patents would serve one primary purpose for society. It would get technology into the open where others could, after a relatively brief period of inventor control, freely access the technology. There have been numerous examples of technology that was not valuable or marginally valuable when invented, that ultimately became incredibly valuable years or decades after the IP was expired. Indeed, much technology is before its time and just about the time it becomes valuable the IP expires, allowing others to capitalize on the market-building efforts of the pioneer.
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Complexity does not equal value.
You can't measure value by counting lines of code, and that drives accountants nuts.
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The 4 things every tech blog commenter should remember.
1) You can be assured that there is at least one person in the world more clever or informed on a particular topic than you, and
2) There is a non-zero, and often quite large, probability that one or more of the aforementioned persons are working for the company you are dismissing, and
3) She/He/They have already thought of everything you're about to post, and several things that you didn't think of (many of them completely orthogonal to the engineering challenges), and have come up with the best solution they can given any reasonable constraints, and
4) They are going to laugh at how ignorant you sound, acting all snarky and authoritative, if they ever read your post.
As I try to remind myself of the above 4 things, I find myself posting much less and laughing much more.
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Re: The 4 things every tech blog commenter should remember.
You need to remind yourself again.
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