Yeah this is what I think too and it's not just limited to open source projects. If it's "good good" then you won't have to promote it too much because it will

Yeah this is what I think too and it's not just limited to open source projects. If it's "good good" then you won't have to promote it too much because it will spread by word of mouth, but in order to get the point where word of mouth is useful a ton of people need to see it. Even if you have something great that people want, if only 1,000 people see it you might not ever get a lot of growth because the numbers aren't there. A prime example of this would be something like the Rails tutorial by Michael Hartl. You don't see him advertising it relentlessly. People just constantly link others to it because it's useful.