Seriously, what did you expect? You created something beautiful. You formed a visual brand that associated itself to good writing. You made it exclusive.
People wanted in. They copied it. You can see examples of this from nature (animals imitating visual properties of other animals to make themselves more scary etc) to modern design strategy (using similar colors / fonts to create a subconscious mental association with something).
If you look carefully at Svbtle or almost any other modern blog, it is not hard to reverse engineer the rules that make these things look good: it's simply font size, line width, leading, and minimal ornamentation. Just make a new blog template that follows the same rules. Leave the "Kudos" thing out while you're at it.
This isn't about sticking up for Dustin Curtis' exclusive rights to minimal, readable blog templates. As approximately every detractor of Svbtle has pointed out approximately always, Svbtle isn't the first site to use minimalist black-on-white breathable sans with a faintly ruled sidebar.
This is about sites going out of their way to pretend an affiliation that they don't have. IBM's blog template is horrible. It would be equally annoying and disrespectful to clone it and change the "IBM" to "IBN".
Great job with Svbtle, Dustin. Sorry to see a dupe like this, on WordPress nevertheless!
Good, because a "blog network" which is essentially a bunch of blogs with the same look has all the utility of a designer clothing label. Or maybe there is some useful aspect of blogs wearing exclusive uniforms that I'm missing?
The current, most popular post on the svbtle network is Dave McClure, a super angel with his own Wikipedia page, hoping that he's a "late bloomer", not a "loser."
dcurtis' latest post:
I’ve been hearing rumblings which suggest that Flipboard is about to be blocked from Twitter’s API, following Instagram’s blockage last week. What is Twitter thinking?
Literally, that's the entire post.
I really like the actual frontend of svbtle blogs, and the 'ideas v. published' blogging interface seems smart, but the notion that this is some curated uber-network is absurd.
I got halfway down the page, to the part where he appears to have picked a bug tracker project at random to call "me-too" and compare to a "Pascal for Dummies" exercise (there's a Pascal book somewhere that mentions Twitter? there's a high school that still teaches Pascal?) --- and started asking how something like this had managed to make it to Svbtle.
Then I realized, "oh, it's wp-svbtle, whatever the fuck that is".
This is a design whose entire purpose is to mimic the Svbtle blog network and confuse readers. Every design choice in it, from the duplication of Curtis' (pointless) "Kudos" thingy to the stroke width of the rules, is made not for its own sake but to duplicate the branding of someone else's site.
It's a jerk move all around, not just to Curtis, or to anyone else who has decided to write for Curtis' network, but to readers, who deserve to know at a glance who an author is, or in this case isn't, affiliated with or endorsed by. And because it's an irritatingly obvious jerk move, it does a disservice to the author as well, making their words a sideshow on their own site.