Ask HN: How and where to gain popularity for your project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How and where to gain popularity for your project?

2 pointsFerkiHN9 comments

I made my project but it is not well known, I tried to advertise it here on Hacker News but I often got [marked], I also tried to promote it through other services but it didn't work on them either It didn't work out to gain popularity, but of all the best services, they were talking about HN It was said here that they gained popularity with the help of this site, but it doesn't work for me.

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(Tried replying on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44603686 but it got flagged (not by me) in the meantime)

IMHO you've tried promoting too hard using Ask HN.

Apart from several "Show HN" about the project there was "Show HN: Tell and show your most successful projects" pointing to the project, "Ask HN: Do you still build terminal tools for fun?", "Ask HN: Let's learn more about each one, shall we?" and "Ask HN: What the project you're most proud of?" had links to it.

"Ask HN: Tell me, what is your favorite programming language?" was a low-ball question and the first comment included "I don't want to be greedy, but please, if you can, support me by putting a star on the repository" making it seem the question was more about self-promotion.

On https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44518588 your comments were "Are there any Linux fans here?" and "How are you". It looks like attempts to what marketers call driving engagement.

Individually understandable, great projects you have, I like them, but it's been all within a week. You got told to post less (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535008) but seems to have shifted to variants of promotion. Try an approach of "how can I promote it this week" instead of "today".

> I sent a polite email asking why. No reply.

I've gotten replies same day but sometimes weeks later. HN moderators care, but are overloaded. There's only one^H^H^H two these days.

Are you talking about your gif decoder project? You've reposted it a bunch of times, and mostly it hasn't been flagged, and when it has it seems to be because people perceive the reposts as spamming.

It may just be that the project isn't interesting to enough people here to gain traction, or that it appeals to a niche audience that isn't well represented here. Just speculating, I don't actually know.

No, I'm talking about the PIT project. Because on the contrary, my project is about GIF I only posted once today, I couldn't repost it many times because I created it yesterday, I just don't know what to do, I feel useless because I create projects that I myself find useful, I can't create others because they don't interest me.

I was just writing an article about this - there’s sooo many undiscovered projects/dark code in the world. It’s hard to know what to do about it; especially as cost of development keeps decreasing. One thing you can do at least is to make something for yourself or a real concrete audience, not a hypothetical audience that might not materialize.

I don't know, but to even interest a specific audience, you also need to recommend it, because no one will see the project so easily if you just create it.

Up to 50 submissions per day pointing to github repositories. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com HN is one default place were projects are posted. I've seen a couple literally 10 minutes old ("first commit"). It's hard (time consuming) to look at them all.

Ah, sorry, I got confused. I even tried to double-check to make sure that it was the same project, but that didn't help. Ah well.

What is your goal with your projects? Unless it's commercial, does it actually matter whether or not they take the world by storm? Almost all of my personal projects (and there have been a lot) I made because they addressed a problem that I was having. A few became very popular. Most did not. I think that's pretty normal. Either way, the value of them was in the doing so they were worth the effort.

Also, a surprising number of projects only gained popularity or relevance a number of years after I released them. Sometimes relevancy is a matter of timing.

I don't know exactly what problem they solve, but for example, my PIT project is 150kb in size and works everywhere. My friend ran it on "zsh with powerlevel10k configuration and MesloNGF font." That is, it is platform-independent and convenient, in my opinion this is enough and this is its feature and difference, for example, over tiv.

I was just hoping that HN a place where you can talk about projects, but mostly there are just regular posts that don't even have anything to do with programming.

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