The Hacker News effect | Hacker News Reader

The Hacker News effect

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    As my first open source project, I would have been happy
    if it got ten watchers. Now it got 439 which meant a
    great responsibility.

This part really rang true to me. I’m working on a hobby project on GitHub I think is going to be great, important, and well-liked some day (as everyone does with their own, I’m sure), but I really like that I can fly under the radar for the moment. At least until some asshole links to it somewhere high-traffic. :)

I am this close to having nightmares about a deluge of poorly-worded issues and pull requests with the most asinine remarks about my project. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be a proper mechanism for managing people like that on GitHub only exacerbates this fear. Funnily, this is also something I have to deal with withing the context of my own project concept, it being community-based. It almost makes you long for something that plugs into GitHub’s own system to make this scale.

I would actually love to read an article about how GitHub projects scale—not the code itself, but the managerial task of managing Issues, Pull Requests, and entitled users. I don’t recall anyone ever doing that. The just-released django-admin-bootstrap has already been inundated with feedback—which is great and all, but seems to be managed much like your e-mails, lest you want to end up in a position where you can’t keep up.

Maybe this could be the occasion for you to do that, reporting live from the battlefield?

>> As my first open source project, I would have been happy if it got ten watchers. Now it got 439 which meant a great responsibility.

> This part really rang true to me.

Yeah, it is. I can relate in some small way. Some time ago I posted on HN nyan-mode.el (https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode), and now I have 71 watches, 10 forks, 4 issue reports and 2 pull requests, not counting many e-mails with feature suggestions, fixes, et. al. Someone even added music! And it's all sitting here and waiting for me to have time to integrate it. I hope I'll manage to get some of it done this or next week. But there is this sense of responsibility when people start using your project; doubled if you happen to walk to your old employer and see your old former coworkers using it on their computers.

</shameless-plug>

> At least until some asshole links to it somewhere high-traffic. :)

You're daring people ;).

Why not use Bitbucket or someplace else that offers free private repos?

It was private at first, but frankly, as I am sure bloggers with an effective audience of zero like I can attest, the chance of serendipitous fame and popularity is so infinitesimal in this digital age that I consider public repos for obscure GitHub accounts tantamount to private. Private repos for people like I are mainly for commercial, license-encumbered, and sensitive projects.

If you’re some sort of wizard like Kenneth Reitz, it is obviously a different matter. I am not Kenneth Reitz.

It is also tremendously helpful to be able to link to my code directly for help, and believe it or not, doing this has yet to launch me into inadvertent open-source stardom. :)

The same can be said for my Twitter, Pinterest, GitHub, Tumblr accounts, my blog, and so on. It’s more of a general principle at hand, I think.

What you need to do now is start a lawsuit against your friend and HN, demanding a removal of all related posts and comments, saying your project's privacy has been compromised. Then you can boost your exposure with the Streisand effect.

Just to go a little meta-meta (I never meta I didn't like ;), I find it interesting to contrast this response to others who have experienced the Hacker News Effect, especially those who come on HN and respond directly to critics. This response was level-headed, humble, and above all, professional. And all that for an (unpaid?) open source project.

Whereas there have been some people who show up with attitudes that, frankly, make me question how they still have customers . . .

There was a time where stories like "Something completely inane happened, here is the break-down" peaked, which rendered a lot of people practically allergic to post-game analyses like this.

That doesn't mean that all of them are bad, and I really liked this article, and hope to see more.

I could see that; geeks/engineers can be prone to over-analysis. That being said, I liked this article and comments too; clear, concise and refreshingly transparent. Some of the worst post-game analyses I've seen seem to be where details are few (bad on the OP), then speculation occurs (bad on the commenters), and worst is when the OP comes and throws a tantrum (or similar) dragging the speculation down to a flamewar (although usually a moderate one by my standards).

Interesting. And similar to what I discovered. I graphed my two most recent experiences being on the front page of HN: http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/whats-the-front-page-of-hack...

While is is fun to see 30K visitors in a day, it's daunting and can play merry hell with your hosting bill if you're not careful.

Still, probably better than languishing in obscurity!

Awesome story and true, I know that I will be following his progrss.

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