I had the experience of implementing an idea successfully. I had a lot of fun with it, it had a degree of popularity, and then one of my community's members wen

I had the experience of implementing an idea successfully. I had a lot of fun with it, it had a degree of popularity, and then one of my community's members went off an implemented the exact same thing on a competing website. Mine was just a hobby and was never going to make money. What was fun about it was that it was original, and I was the only person doing it, and it had a fun little community and it got some press, too. It was rewarding in a social sense, a fun hobby. That other guy probably thought there might have been a little bit of commercial benefit to it, or SEO benefit. He launched his site - the same system, just "his" instead of mine. It seemed like the community started getting quiet - they felt awkward about the new site since he was a prior community member. The whole experience soured me on the idea and I started losing interest too. I eventually took my site down. His site is still going and he's since updated it to generate its content automatically, but it appears to get zero traffic, and has zero community. It's a weird feeing, kind of like being replaced by something soulless. I don't know what my point is - you could definitely argue that that's just the way it goes sometimes, that I got some fun out of it, and people are always free to try and implement the same thing you do, it's not like I had a patent. But I also feel like the other site contributed to me losing motivation to keep mine going as a hobby, and his site didn't go anywhere either, so overall it feels like a net negative to whatever tiny bit of culture was living at that time.