Culture of crediting

26 Jul 2025

With all of this hullabaloo on blog metrics and upvote counts, I must say: the most interesting part of Bearblog analytics isn't the numbers¹ — it's the referrers. I would happily turn off collecting analytics if it meant I'd still be able to see the referrers list. I have found so many cool hidden (not on the discovery feed) Bearblogs through it. And that's in large part due to the culture of crediting in this community — they linked to me when they tried out some of the CSS I shared (thanks!).

Which leads me to: a Bearblog neighbor reached out for my opinion about a new blog they encountered that looked just like their own custom blog. They weren't sure how to feel about the situation & asked for my thoughts. After comparing both blogs' CSS & confirming they were identical, I emailed back my response — which I'm also sharing below (slightly edited).

I haven't been a part of creative hobby communities for many years now, and I wonder what the general sentiment on this topic is these days.

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I did a code compare, and it is identical. I also looked to see if they mentioned you as a source of inspiration, and they did not.

I think there are a few things here:

• The intent of the author/artist
• The intent of the person who copied the work
• The culture of the community (and how familiar the copycat is with the unspoken expectations)

For myself, I've "open sourced" most of my CSS with the intent for others to learn from it, use it, and remix it. If there were another blog that looked just like mine, or looked similarly with some mods, I wouldn't mind it. This was my intent. I really like writing CSS and hope to inspire more people to learn and explore it — and most learning comes from seeing and copying how others have written it. I like contributing to the community in this way.

For others, they may be creating something unique for themselves. This too is an art; it's many little decisions and hours spent reading tutorials and researching to achieve a very specific thing they wanted to create for themselves. Many people put pieces of themselves in their creation, reflecting their interests and personalities. And when someone else just comes, copies and pastes what they created, and uses it for themselves (without speaking with the original artist or crediting them), it can be irksome. There's no acknowledgement of the thought and hard work that the original artist put into creating it. It's disrespectful, especially since the original artist did not intend for their design to be used that way.

I also think that some people may simply not know that it's not okay to just take other people's CSS like that without acknowledgment. (I like to approach these things in good faith, assuming ignorance first rather than malicious intent. Here's an interesting game that highlights why this matters: The Evolution of Trust.) In these cases, I think direct communication is best to resolve any misunderstandings and set expectations.

Of course, in this case, it was a very obvious copy-and-paste, so it's a lot clearer what happened here. Within creative communities, there is so much grey area. There's loosely inspired by, heavily inspired by — things could look a little alike or a lot alike. When I see similarities, I don't like to assume that someone copied my work just because it looked similar. More likely than not, we each just separately had the same idea or same influences.

My general approach now is to over-credit rather than under-credit, if I saw something that sparked an idea, I like to mention the original artist. But this is a personal preference — it's my way of promoting another human's art because I think it's cool. In an age where bots and algorithms elevate the content they want, this is my little way of being a human that elevates other human content.

This is also learned behavior. I observed how the community works and decided to adopt these practices based on what I saw others do. If someone is entirely new to the community, they may not be privy to this — in this way, I think a little communication can go a long way in introducing best practices.

P.S. I've read that some artists regard copycats as a good thing — that their art was well-regarded enough for another to want to mimic it. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that. I hold this view also.