Understood - but the lesson to learn, in my opinion, is different. You don't get that organic traffic if you don't have traction and value. So the real lesson

Understood - but the lesson to learn, in my opinion, is different. You don't get that organic traffic if you don't have traction and value. So the real lesson to learn is how did they get that traction? It most certainly wasn't from content that wasn't yet created. I can imagine it was difficult for them to get users to commit their code at first - especially when a thousand other code-hosting sites already had significant traction. Your theory holds true for ANY content driven website - from blogs where community provides free content via comments and other sorts of feedback to almost any other valuable website where you've created value and people link to you. It's a wonderful result of what happens when you create value. That's my lesson. I've never created anything of "consumer" value so I could be completely wrong!