Can somebody tell me what is technically interesting about Svbtle? How is it different from, say, Tumblr? It seems to be just a normal CMS with a minimalistic look. It does attract a lot of prominent bloggers in tech, which, to me, has more to do with Curtis's personal connections than any technical merits.
For me, the best part of Svbtle is it's management and writing interface. They are geared towards getting you to write more. By considering drafts as 'Ideas' rather than actual posts, a huge mental block is released. Now you just jot down any half-baked thought that occurs to you and you can expand upon it later, when you have actually given it some thought. This is something you can already do in any other blogging platform, but the difference is there is no implicit expectation from the software that this will become a full fledged post. Which in turn allows you to write about stuff you probably would not have written before. It's a mental thing, and I'm afraid I can't really explain it better.
I'm pretty sure you answered your own question there. I don't know for sure but I tend to agree with your assessment. I wondered the same thing for a long time and I finally realized that this is one of those questions where the answer is so simple that you refuse to consider it because of how damn simple it really is.
Such assessment doesn't answer my personal question about why so many people are fixated with emulating, comparing and flat out copying Svbtle.
Dustin outlined some very cool design decisions when he first introduced Svbtle, but the presentation of final content wasn't incredibly unique which further confuses me. He shared some interesting workflow ideas which people are free to share, so why insist on publicly using Svbtle as some arbitrary benchmark?
