My simple GitHub project went viral
gourav.io
gourav.io
[0] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
The real challenge in these systems is to make them work at scale. In part because their business model only works at scale.
Something as simple as a "likes" counter is not trivial to do at scale.
The list never really makes it clear. I also remember some of the links were broken and overall it was pretty pointless.
Similarly here, it tells me every little about what the post is going to be. There's a bit of what happened, but also it's a writeup of what it is and how it's made. A better title might be "How I made an Open Source Clones List go Viral on GitHub" - just off the top of my head, you can probably do better, but it would already help you figure out whether you're interested in what it has to offer before having to click.
1. "Bernie Madoff Dies in Prison" - who's Bernie Madoff?
2. "Deno 1.9" - what's Deno? Is it edible?
3. "Yamauchi No.10 Family Office" - I have absolutely no idea what to expect
Instead, why not write:
1. "Bernard Madoff, Mastermind of Giant Ponzi Scheme, Dies at 82" (original Bloomberg title, explains who Madoff is)
2. "Deno 1.9 (A secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript)" (short description taken from the official homepage)
3. I still have no idea what this is, maybe someone can enlighten me
Let's talk about how people use HN in practice on titles they don't understand. They open the thread and piece together context from the top few comments. And that's fine, it works.
HN is not like Stackoverflow with its persnickety rules. This topic generated some discussion including those who feel the title is not suitable. That's a success.
Ironic to me that the ones objecting to the title say they value the time wasted to "click" but then write sentences explaining why that time was wasted. So x seconds to click and figure out you don't like the title and then 10x seconds to write a critique? Maybe just ignore it next time and move on with life?
You're making it sound as if this is about a single person clicking a single link and skimming until they find the necessary context (say, 15 seconds) to judge whether they want to continue reading, versus debating a topic in a subthread (minutes). Obviously, the actual point is that everyone needs to click many links whenever they visit HN and is continously sinking that time for as many useless titles as are being posted or as they can be bothered to click through on. (If needing to click to find out what it's about is fine, we should browse HN with only the stories' rank and no title at all.) We could instead choose to not religiously stick to applying a guideline on using the original title. After all, I would also like:
> HN [to not be] like Stackoverflow with its persnickety rules.
Well, how else do you think they got a list of links put together in a github repo, to become viral in first place!
> Last month (Mar'21), I made a simple project
It's not like anyone's been using the product long-term or as if individual users incur a significant cost, and the author hasn't been asking to help with hosting costs or anything.
I don't usually donate right upon finding a random fun project, unless I incurred costs (by doing a significant computation or if it sent a number of SMSes or so) for the person who hosts it. I donate to things like the Internet Archive or OpenStreetMap because they have real hosting costs, or the K9 mail client because there's a lot of coding that needs doing, I would like it to be done, and someone's offering to do it for crowdfunded money. Or sci-hub, because the owner gave up a lot to make it happen and I think it has had a net positive effect in the world.
There are other projects I've donated to and more reasons I'd donate, but generally I don't find this weirdly low for this kind of project and also not representative of what you could expect if you do create something that'll require donations, provided it 'goes viral' to the same extent as this project.
My donation button (top center of page) has only been used once over the span of 5 years, even though it gets praised across various forums and communities within the niche.
That's not an intrinsically valuable act.
This is not in itself a reason to pay for stuff.
> Also perhaps because it is useful to people and if we ever hope to keep good content coming, without having to suffer through endless ads, we should support, what we deem to be good content.
This sentence seems self-contradicting in relation to the article existing. Assuming we think that the project from the article is in fact good, it follows that good content is already coming even if we don't pay for it.
A small case could be made that perhaps this was an experiment by the author and we want to reward this to create positive reinforcement, but an equally valid argument could be made that paying for this type of aggregator content will create a mass of buzzfeed style "list of awesome X" aggregation websites. Monetization tends to create perverse incentives, after all.
I disagree with the second point though. In the end people need to put food on the table and I for one am glad, if people can do so by doing things they enjoy and that add value to society. If I like some project and I see, that it was only enabled by people putting forward effort, even though they are not paid to do so initially, then I often think about supporting them. My idea of a good future is, that more people can add value to society not in the jobs they do not like to do, but instead in the projects they would like to do and can live from that. I don't think it is a small case. In fact I think this is what should happen more often, so that we get away from a model, where everything is measured in how much it costs and towards a model, in which people show how much value things brought them, by supporting creators.
I think this would help reducing gaps in society. Someone who can not afford to give a lot can still make use of things, while someone who can give a lot is able to support more people.
It reaches into every area of our lives. Currently we have social media networks, where the users are the product sold. Instead we could have social media, where users, who can afford to support, give in order to keep the service alive and running. There are already people, who crowd-finance their Mastodon instances and work (time working on) those and similar projects.
Maybe this is something that is quite far from our reality right now, but at least I am seeing some cases of it in projects, that I support.
What exactly would qualify as "added value" in your mind?
You are reading these posts on such a thing right now.
I had much better results when I started converting my tutorials into ebooks and sold them. Obviously having a paid product is different, but I'm referring to the paid sales I got whenever I put up 'pay what you want' offer.
[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...
This was also the first course in the list, so not exactly a good first impression.
The console lists this: https://pastebin.com/KQqjdCc8
Not a bad idea at all, plus the templates you already have are pretty neat. I could see applications w.r.t. professional development or even marketing to product people with the purpose of simplifying product roadmaps (and sharing with C-levels, etc.).
You have something here, screw donations. Free users suck anyway; my free project[1] has ~1500 MAU and I kind of want to stop working on it because the entitlement is unreal.
Think of the market value for some of the open tools you use and how much they would cost you that you instead get for free.
To me, that's the payment you get even before you contribute.
An easy way to estimate this: think of how many websites you visit a year, then divide the number of donations you make per year by that.
If this number isn't zero, you're a statistical outlier.
Donations just aren't that common.
It's literally a con to pull on tourists
Not saying you are personally doing this, since you specifically said you're not complaining, just my feelings on the matter.
It will end in one of many started github repos, you might rememeber it but most people don't need to look up a clone.
While i like that we appreachiate small things, sometimes i do wonder if it would have saved more time if we wouldnt do things.
I have to find a weekly hn newsletter system.
No issues with what the author made. But chasing virality is empty. I don’t know if the author was doing that.
Until now I had assumed Grammarly was for people who should have learned to write better in school. I wonder if there's a Dutch Grammarly? :P
It just doesn't mean what you intended :)
Their business model may be OK, it's just something that you need to be aware of (and a lot of people I've talked to aren't).
From the privacy policy:
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You could try a locally self-hosted instance of https://languagetool.org/ to avoid sending all your online typing to an extra party.
Not sure if it's missing any notable features of the SAAS product.
From my relatively experience of Grammarly (I had an account a couple of years ago) a self-hosted instance of LT is slightly better than Grammarly "free" but doesn't have the extra analysis offered by Grammarly's paid accounts.
Can indeed be recommended as substitute to grammarly free.
I give them the credit that they fixed it within hours, but should the project-zero team fill in for their testing team ? :-) https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=15...
It is fairly normal to have people on Fivver and Upwork tell you 'I can make the web scrapper for u' when discussing a project.
Just as we wouldn't think to implement Quicksort 10 or 20 years ago, because we have great, optimized reusable components, this is the next logical step: Focussing on building the 10% that differentiate the product instead of reinventing the wheel.
I use the sort function of a standard library because it has been written by seasoned devs, reviewed, rewritten; use known algorithms and practices; and being part of a well known standard library it has a chance of still being maintained, distributed and available ten years from now on.
I don't know how you can even remotely compare that to an unmaintained code dump that someone made as a learning experiment over the week.
I'm not dissing on theses kinds of code release, they are great to learn from, but I would find it a bit foolish to base your whole product on it.
Or should be more better rephrased: It's a open source clone of AlternativeTo.
The bar for what is considered achievements is constantly lowered.
HN no longer gets interesting submissions, just drivel.
If you think that HN needs better submissions, you can submit things yourself. Or spent time looking through new submissions and voting up the ones that you like. Then show up and leave thought-provoking comments on articles.
All are more productive than complaining about someone creating yet another list that was interesting enough for thousands of people to star.