But I was also pretty confident that I made something useful, and, in hindsight, I don't think I should have preemptively felt bad about using some "cheap" form of marketing to get people to see it. I have really conflicting thoughts about marketing and self-promotion from my experience trying to show people my other project, plaintextsports.com [1] (live sports scores in plain text with no ads or trackers so it loads instantly! I think the HN crowd would love it!). There's a weird line between marketing and advertising and self-promotion, where one is "ok", but the other is frowned upon. It's also a tale as old as time that the better marketed but technically inferior product wins out. (AC vs DC initially, Betamax vs VHS!) How much of success is being brazen enough to ignore those norms and shamelessly promote something? Should it be considered shameful to promote it in the first place?
In this case, being written in Rust is definitely a feature, as least when comparing tools! fx [2], a similar tool that made the front-page a couple months ago runs using Node, and I'm sure jless can handle bigger files and uses less memory (though admittedly I haven't actually verified this).
