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It's also the same with open source work. You need social connections to big influencers or successful startups in order for your project to get popular. The ma

It's also the same with open source work. You need social connections to big influencers or successful startups in order for your project to get popular. The main channel seems to be Twitter; that's where open source projects tend to be shared and a lot. I barely use my Twitter account so I was very lucky that one of my projects became popular (over 5K stars on GitHub now). It's a general purpose back end framework. The only hype that my project got was that it appeared on the front page of HN a couple. of times at the beginning (this was a few years ago). Because my project grew organically (and mosly linearly) without much social hype, most users tend to be small independent developers who use it for side projects. Also it's now being used by 2 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap). Cryptocurrencies tend to generate their own network effects.

baroffoos 8y ago
No you don't lol. I created a brand new reddit account and posted my OSS project on /r/linux and it was on the top for a while with almost 2k votes. I didn't spend any time marketing or finding influences I just dumped a link and it was shared all over the place because people thought it was cool.
- jondubois 8y ago
  Same happened to my project. I posted it on Reddit, someone saw it and posted it on HN then it made it to the front page. It got almost 1k stars in the first 3 days. That was very unusual. It was pure luck. Just like with your project. You think it's normal because it happened to you but it's not. For the vast majority of popular open source project, they got popular because of social connections.