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I feel that your second point is vitally important for creators (particularly new developers) to spend time thinking about. For a long while I was caught in th

by tannerc 12y ago

I feel that your second point is vitally important for creators (particularly new developers) to spend time thinking about. For a long while I was caught in the trap of believing that I wasn't any good because none of my work had "taken off" as much as the work I would hear about on HN or TechCrunch, etc. It's a dangerous place to be, particularly because it can lead to a lack of motivation and ultimately debilitating depression. But it's also a myth, to believe you're not producing the same caliber of work as others (though you may not be, that's a discussion for a whole new thread). I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on. Hype (marketing) plays a role, but I think a game's popularity is generally a function of its addictiveness multiplied by its quality. There are exceptions, such as Goat Simulator (which was almost entirely a fad) but it seems like the inherent nature of 2048 would let it succeed in any era. It's viscerally addictive for many people, so as long as you can get some number of people playing it, it'll do fine. It seems like another reason 2048 was successful is because it was open source from the start. There were about a dozen remixed versions of 2048, and few of those would have happened without the source code being available from the beginning. People would have made their own versions, but it would have taken a lot more time than "let's just use this code that already exists."
kolodny 12y ago
As a developer submitting to Show HN, there are some projects that I expected to take off and some that were mere novelties. Two of my biggest projects were things I didn't expect to make a bleep, yet the project that I considered most useful [0] never went anywhere [0] https://github.com/kolodny/nip https://github.com/kolodny/nip
- vidarh 12y ago
  For "nip", I suspect that is because it quite literally is "plumbing" of a sort that people have their favourite tools for from before, whether it's awk, sed, perl, or any other language interpreter that can easily take an expression on the command line (e.g. ruby can pretend to be both awk and sed of sorts with the right command line options). It looks neat, but it'd appeal to people who spend most of their time doing stuff with node anyway, and doesn't have other scripting alternatives they prefer for one-liners. There's a ton of inertia for those kind of tools. E.g. even though I prefer Ruby, I tend to use awk for one-liners because I can expect it to be available "everywhere", and because I have "muscle memory" for dozens of common patterns because I started using it so long ago. That's not a criticism of your tool - just some thoughts on reasons why it might be harder to get attention for that kind of tool.

by tannerc 12y ago

sillysaurus3 12y ago

I think it's important for us to acknowledge just how much _luck_ plays into the success of creations like 2048. Granted, the game is stellar and beautifully crafted, but there was a lot of luck involved in the wave it got to ride, from the timing of release, to the time it was posted to HN, to the people who tweeted about it, and so on. Hype (marketing) plays a role, but I think a game's popularity is generally a function of its addictiveness multiplied by its quality. There are exceptions, such as Goat Simulator (which was almost entirely a fad) but it seems like the inherent nature of 2048 would let it succeed in any era. It's viscerally addictive for many people, so as long as you can get some number of people playing it, it'll do fine. It seems like another reason 2048 was successful is because it was open source from the start. There were about a dozen remixed versions of 2048, and few of those would have happened without the source code being available from the beginning. People would have made their own versions, but it would have taken a lot more time than "let's just use this code that already exists."

kolodny 12y ago

As a developer submitting to Show HN, there are some projects that I expected to take off and some that were mere novelties. Two of my biggest projects were things I didn't expect to make a bleep, yet the project that I considered most useful [0] never went anywhere [0] https://github.com/kolodny/nip https://github.com/kolodny/nip

vidarh 12y ago
For "nip", I suspect that is because it quite literally is "plumbing" of a sort that people have their favourite tools for from before, whether it's awk, sed, perl, or any other language interpreter that can easily take an expression on the command line (e.g. ruby can pretend to be both awk and sed of sorts with the right command line options). It looks neat, but it'd appeal to people who spend most of their time doing stuff with node anyway, and doesn't have other scripting alternatives they prefer for one-liners. There's a ton of inertia for those kind of tools. E.g. even though I prefer Ruby, I tend to use awk for one-liners because I can expect it to be available "everywhere", and because I have "muscle memory" for dozens of common patterns because I started using it so long ago. That's not a criticism of your tool - just some thoughts on reasons why it might be harder to get attention for that kind of tool.