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great article, i know a few talented devs who would benefit greatly from these tips. I think some people are averse to hacking the growth of their project and t

great article, i know a few talented devs who would benefit greatly from these tips. I think some people are averse to hacking the growth of their project and think they just need to put up a terse readme and the people will come. But these tips seem innocuous enough, no dark patterns to motivate growth here, simply basic advertising and economics applied to github repos. i almost feel like the intro about stars may turn people away before they get to the article, which hopefully shouldnt happen.

TAForObvReasons 5y ago
"if you build it, they will come" and "terse readmes" work very well in problem domains that don't have a few compelling open source solutions. Fanciful READMEs and marketing matter a lot more in a competitive/saturated space.
- penjelly 5y ago
  the article points out that the only way your repo will get attention if theres nobody else in the problem space, or your lib is much simpler then the other tools, so i think it can be both efficient in terms of description and mildly attractive visually. Also i think "fanciful" is a bit misleading here. Sure they recommend an icon, and/or an animation. i dont think thats necessarily overkill for some projects
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
OJFord 5y ago
..or they don't care whether people come or not? I have a lot of little things I'm going to work on no matter what, a few that I'd appreciate help with but I'm not so bothered that I'm going to start 'hacking the growth', and none where the goal is to have a 'successful' repo with lots of stars and users or whatever. (I do help maintain/triage a couple of popular ones now, but I didn't get them where they are.)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Right. Sometimes I put up my code because I think it might be useful or educational to someone else, and I'd actually rather it not become popular because I don't want to deal with people giving much of a shit about it.

TAForObvReasons 5y ago

"if you build it, they will come" and "terse readmes" work very well in problem domains that don't have a few compelling open source solutions. Fanciful READMEs and marketing matter a lot more in a competitive/saturated space.

penjelly 5y ago
the article points out that the only way your repo will get attention if theres nobody else in the problem space, or your lib is much simpler then the other tools, so i think it can be both efficient in terms of description and mildly attractive visually. Also i think "fanciful" is a bit misleading here. Sure they recommend an icon, and/or an animation. i dont think thats necessarily overkill for some projects
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

OJFord 5y ago

..or they don't care whether people come or not? I have a lot of little things I'm going to work on no matter what, a few that I'd appreciate help with but I'm not so bothered that I'm going to start 'hacking the growth', and none where the goal is to have a 'successful' repo with lots of stars and users or whatever. (I do help maintain/triage a couple of popular ones now, but I didn't get them where they are.)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Right. Sometimes I put up my code because I think it might be useful or educational to someone else, and I'd actually rather it not become popular because I don't want to deal with people giving much of a shit about it.