<story><title>How Do Developers Promote Open Source Projects?</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04219</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>near</author><text>A very useful article, thank you for sharing.&lt;p&gt;This is definitely a hard problem for solo developers who are like me and have significant difficulty with social aspects. I&amp;#x27;ve never submitted any of my projects or writing here, because I have this underlying feeling that I&amp;#x27;d be bothering people. It also doesn&amp;#x27;t help to be on a site filled daily with dozens of really incredible projects that feel so much more deserving of attention. Yet I&amp;#x27;ve often found myself bewildered by concepts such as SEO and promotion, and I much prefer to spend my time coding. I hate to generalize, but I can&amp;#x27;t imagine I&amp;#x27;m particularly unique in this regard.&lt;p&gt;But indeed, it&amp;#x27;s a serious growth limiter when we are stuck working alone. I feel like any serious open source project really needs someone on the team who groks all the social stuff and can get the word out to the right parties who would be interested. A networking service to connect these two types of people would truly be invaluable, I feel.&lt;p&gt;I was also told that technical writing helps a lot, and indeed, despite being a little guy in a small niche, two of my articles were submitted by others recently, and seeing such a positive response has been a huge boost to my self-esteem and confidence. (It did ruin my bounce rate stats though, went from 44% to 87% in two days :p)&lt;p&gt;But yeah, I&amp;#x27;ll agree with the arXiv conclusion that HN is an incredibly valuable resource for open source developers, with a very friendly community behind it.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Do Developers Promote Open Source Projects?</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04219</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moron4hire</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a little worried that this only studies channels and not the original content itself. I&amp;#x27;ve personally used most of these channels and have found a rather &amp;quot;bucket-of-crabs&amp;quot; sort of reaction, unless I&amp;#x27;m very, very careful to release an absolutely perfect post.&lt;p&gt;There generally seems to be only a level of tolerance for projects released by big companies. If you have a FANG coolant behind your name, it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter what you&amp;#x27;re releasing, how long you&amp;#x27;ve been working on it, or even how big your team actually is, you&amp;#x27;ll grab a ton of popularity.&lt;p&gt;But as a solo dev releasing under my own name, the only things I can get attention for are basically hacks in niche topics. The long-standing, well designed work I do, that is used in real projects, with tons of documentation and proven results, at best gets ignored. At worst, I get accused of &amp;quot;re-inventing the wheel&amp;quot;, even for things &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; invented.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve never gotten anyone to join me on a project. There are a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies that &amp;quot;solo-dev work won&amp;#x27;t be around in a year, so don&amp;#x27;t bother even starting&amp;quot;. Either I release too early and people don&amp;#x27;t want to join because nothing is finished, or I put a ton of effort into documentation and contribution guidelines and then things just get ignored. Just when is it a good time to go from code I&amp;#x27;ve written on my own to sharing with others?&lt;p&gt;It just really makes it seem like FOSS is only for people who have a big, recognised company backing them. I&amp;#x27;ve even had a project or two copied by recognized companies, with no larger team than one or two people, and watched their half-baked early releases quickly eclipse my own efforts just because they could get people to join the effort and work for free.</text></comment>