Farewell, Building in Public | Hacker News

I empathise with the comments about copycats. I made a web game and initially put it up on github pages. It was inspired by a similar web game which had been abandoned and I wanted to add features etc so I re-created it from scratch. Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating me on social media and ranking quite well on Google. It's no longer open source. The copy cat site now has adverts up and links to a network of copycat web games. Many copy cat sites are now embedding my site proxied (to avoid CORS) and surrounded with adverts. These sites rank really well on Google because the copy cat sites link to each other. The game is at https://redactle-unlimited.com if you want to check it out. I haven't made a life changing amount from donations but it actually might be a significant amount for people in poorer economies. The bottom line is that you need to have a moat by having a trusted brand or database/codebase that can't be imitated.