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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

Especially in ruby world, it's amazing how big impact marketing has on open source projects.

It's nothing new that when you prepare a nice webpage with some pictures and logo your project is more likely to gain some traction. But mentioned element of social media and virality makes sometimes seemingly random projects to become popular.

It would seem that when releasing an open source project, your webdesign and marketing skills are way more important than your programming skills.

It gets fixed a bit later because when project becomes popular some good programmers join in and get rid of some silly bugs and so on. But the original design and assumptions stay. API often stays. And since I consider programming nowadays being a lot of like building from lego blocks, API has a huge influence on programmers productivity.

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Marketing shows that a project has some money behind it, which is a good sign it's going to be supported for a while, which allays the biggest fear most people and organizations have when selecting an open source tool: "is it abandonware?"

I guess actually evaluating the project itself is completely out of the question? Or you could, you know, adopt it and continue it?

The idea that the technical excellence of open source is secondary to it's marketing/influence is toxic at it's core, and reflects yet another way that developer culture has been infected by Business.

Developers focus more on amassing influence than raw skills. We're told to work on 'important' open source projects (remember when everyone fell over themselves to say they contributed to Rails?) and to jump on bandwagons. We're exhorted to take Github stars and activity streaks seriously (lol). And we're told that we can never do enough marketing for our open source projects, that we should buy domain names, blog about it, write more documentation, do bugfixes in a speedy fashion, speak, and maintain social media handles.

This will only get worse over time, because we're all convinced we have to amass influence. We're literally working ourselves to death for a few values stored in a database.

So instead of discussing "Worse is better" vs "Worse is worse", we should talk about "Presentation is better".

"Better presentation is more effective at attracting attention" would, I think, be the only reasonable conclusion here (and then only because it seems axiomatic).

In that context, it would be interest to talk to someone like kalzumeus about testing developer response to various methods of presentation for open source projects, not only to see what works in that regard, but to see whether contributors and adopters respond to the same sort of cues you'd expect to encourage consumer behavior.

This is the case in every industry right now, and has been since the beginning of time. Marketing is the ability to influence people. It seems obvious to say this, but people who can influence people are usually the people with the most successful products (see: politicians, Apple, pg, etc.).

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