Me-too products are a great start for aspiring entrepreneurs. I'd like to apologize to all of Hacker News for being such an asshole in my previous post [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4338182]. There's nothing wrong with building ANOTHER Mobile ad platform, social media analytics, team based project manager, reward program site, online store builder, or subscription service is perfectly fine. Money is money, business is business. Building anything is a thousand times better than building nothing.
What about me-too comments? Are they also thousand times better than writing nothing? Is it different because of scale?
IMO biggest value of Me-too products are in their (even slight) differences from existing ones. For entrepreneur they obviously give him experience and may bring him money but from consumer point of view gains are smaller. Me-too products increase competition(making monopoly or stagnation less likely and bringing prices down), but straight up clones have same (relatively small) cost as me-too comments: decreasing signal to noise ratio.
Clones at the same or higher price increase noise.... unless they have better marketing to reach a wider customer range than the original; that adds value.
