I’ve recently discovered the website digital point. It’s a marketplace of sorts where Internet business people, hobbyists et al converge to network.

I’ve made a few dollars there selling odds and ends, which in this business can be anything - a text link, a website template, an actual website, an ebook - mostly digital products that get traded between buyers and sellers. I would be classified as both a buyer and a seller, as would many of the digital point members I’m sure.

Coming from a background of earning more than $100,000 as a software developer with several products on the market, having to resort to selling myself on a forum like digital point is more often than not frustrating, mainly because of the very thing that caused me to decide to get out of the commercial software development industry. After my software products started showing up on warez sites and people started contacting me for support who hadn’t bought my programs legally, I decided it was time to bring an end to my adventures as a commercial software developer. I’m just one person after all, and if Microsoft couldn’t bring a complete stop to the piracy of their products, what hope did I have? So I took my products off the market and gave up the 50% share I owned in a popular dating application I’d originally developed then later hired a programmer to improve for me. That programmer has now taken my original product and created an even more highly competitive dating application that will no doubt make him some decent money. I am thrilled for him, and I don’t regret my decision to move on to something else; but when I’m faced with situations where, in trying to sell my merchandise on places like digital point, I’m getting asked if it’s really mine, if it’s original content and so forth, it is excruciatingly disheartening considering the reason I am on a site like digital point to begin with.

Obviously, having had my products stolen and distributed on warez sites, pirated and sold for money, I know from experience that theft is a highly common problem across the Internet. Every time I write a post on any of the blog sites that I struggle to maintain, that post instantly becomes at risk for theft, unless of course it’s just so badly written; but even then there’s always someone who’ll take your material and use it for their own gain and you’re seldom able to do much of anything about it. I learned that the hard way.

Sites like digital point are useful if you’re able to get past the tendency to suspect that everyone who tries to sell is a shady character. I suppose I can understand considering shady characters seem to dominate. There’s always someone trying to trick you out of money, out your ideas, out of anything they can conceivably trick you out of. That’s the nature of the Internet. It’s really not unlike any other kind of marketplace. On both the buyer’s side and the seller’s honesty is rare, and everyone is held under suspicion. Everyone is a potential con artist until proven an honest business person.