When I first heard Steve Jobs quote Picasso saying, "Great artists steal", I didn't fully get it.
Today, decades later, while exploring various Nostr clients, I think I finally groked what he meant by this.
I had been raised to think, "stealing is bad", and indeed, it is bad. My position on that hasn't changed.
But what I understand now is that when it comes to great ideas, we sometimes have no choice but to steal them.
Problems can arise when designers, working on a new app — that does essentially the same thing as another app, but in a new way — decide to deviate from the original app's design in order to avoid coming across as "stealing" or "ripping off" the other app's UI. They can unintentionally make the new app's UI worse for no good reason.
Sometimes you shouldn't deviate from the original design, because sometimes the original design was correct. Sometimes the original design was close to perfect, or even perfect. Sometimes the original design had so much thought put into it that deviating from it is folly, and just makes your "new" design worse for the sole purpose of attempting to avoid looking like you've ripped everything off from some other app.
We see this not just in the design of social media apps, but in the design of video games and other creative projects. Why are new RTS games failing to beat StarCraft 2? Partly because they aren't copying it enough! The game is close to perfect.
Designers should feel free to deviate and explore alternative ideas, however, they should also explore alternative improvements to original designs. If they cannot find any such designs, then for their user's sake, they might not have any choice but to steal.
We can improve on the original quote from Picasso: "Great artists improve on original work, good artists steal, and bad artists release crap to appear original."