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Correct. A lot of disaffected programmers think "marketing" is a dirty word and they will have no hand in it. It's a type of magical thinking that forgets the movie Field of Dreams ("if you build it, they will come") is about a literal miracle. There's really no such thing in the real world.

"Advertising" open source projects doesn't typically involve taking out ads on Facebook, but you still need to perform the marketing task. Get out to events and stand up as a speaker--event organizers are always desperate for content. Write blog posts. Make videos demonstrating how to use your tech.

If you don't care about growing your project beyond yourself, sure, feel free to skip these things. But if you're really serious about growing your project, it should take about half your total time on the project.

Speaking at events really doesn't seem that effective to me at gaining exposure. One post on reddit would net 25-30x the number of stars that a conference/large meetup gig would.

It's more useful for reaching out and making stronger real life contacts with people who might be interested in using your software, but the net isn't cast nearly as wide.

On multiple occasions for various project over the years, I've received several thousand views to my sites from a Show HN or a Reddit post. In comparison, doing a talk is "only" 25 or so views. If all you care about is views, clearly posting online is better.

But I care about people actually using my software. And giving a talk usually ends with 3 or 4 people actually trying my project. Or if I'm running a class, it's 30 or 40. In the last two years, I'm pretty sure there is one person from all the Show HNs and Reddit posts that is using my project. From even the few number of local talks I've given, I have a small cohort of people not only using my software, but giving me feedback on it as well. We see each other once a month, at least. It's one of the greatest feelings ever to talk to a person, face to face, who is excited about your project and hasn't run away even after using it.

Also, I can't guarantee that a post I make will get to HN's front page where it will get so many views. But at this point in time, I get asked to do a talk about once a month. If I really put the effort in, I could probably be doing talks once a week.

And all those thousands of HN viewers never once offered to sponsor the continued development of my project. But my progress on giving in-person talks got me in front of just the right people and now I can work on my project full-time.

In a similar situation, my wife has a couple of sci-fi novels that she self-publishes online. The vast, vast majority of her sales have been in-person at book fairs. People at book fairs are ready to buy. They are there because they want to spend money. It's an easy sale. Online, you have to intrude on people and fight against the million other people self-publishing.

Yes, you cast a much wider net online. But it's a net with big holes and for much, much smaller fish. Follow the numbers, the important ones, not "views" or "stars" or other such things that aren't "cold, hard, cash". The cash says in-person marketing is significantly easier to execute than online.

> The paper assumes that popular repositories are popular on their own merit.

I read the paper and don't see this assumption. The authors seem well aware of marketing, calling the fastest growth cluster "viral", and conducting a tiny survey of developers finding ... that the developers posted to HN and social media.

Added: I agree only looking at most popular repos is a big problem. The authors (inadequately in my view) acknowledge this in treats to validity.

  > The authors seem well aware of marketing, calling the
  > fastest growth cluster "viral"

Viral is a description of rate of growth. It makes no statement about the reason for the growth, so much of the viral growth may have been due to people searching GitHub for keywords that would describe a solution to the problem they're having. I know that's what I do.

Exactly. I have a reasonably popular github project (Haraka, an SMTP server) and frankly the stars mean nothing.

What really means something for an open source project is two things:

- for ego only: the large scale users (eg one user I spoke to a couple of weeks ago is receiving over 200 million emails a day with it, with a single server doing over 150k concurrent connections - that's why I built Haraka and it's a good feeling knowing it can do that)

- for contributions: I don't want to be the sole developer - I have other stuff to do. Getting contributions from the community is a far better metric than stars. But more stars do tend to equal more contributions.

> one in February for literally no reason

Well, no reason you were able to identify, anyway.

But I agree that external factors like good marketing (of some kind or other) seem to play a huge role, in actual observed reality.

By "literally no reason," I mean that nothing done in the repository itself caused the exposure, which is exactly the problem with the results presented. (See commit log, there were no commits proximate prior to the Feb 9 date of the threads: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings/com...)

The February /r/webdev thread in question: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/44wc5b/big_list_of_...