Ask HN: Is your Open-Source project's traction real or noise?

1 pointsimilev7mo ago2 comments

Hey all, I've been working on an open-source project for the past few months. It became open-source 2 weeks ago. In the first few days the project got lot's of traction by just launching here on HN and few sub-reddits we got up-to 500 stars in 2, 3 days (I thought it was mostly Reddit, as on HN we got 6 upvotes).

Our project is technology specific so we share only with the relevant communities, started with python. Now we added support for TypeScript and so posted at few subreddits relevant to type-script. We got a lot of up-votes there, currently the hottest post on vuejs, however no stars on github.

I was wondering does this mean that people actually don't care, as it seems they up-vote but don't really check the project. A question for all open-source people, how do you measure these different sources of traction as I also got nice discussions under the posts. Is it that the profile of people who star repositories is very different from those who are just kind of interested but do not really about the open-source aspect?

I also thought it could be as the repo is written in Python and TypeScript people don't like that. This is our project, maybe also we don't put enough effort in the readme: https://github.com/CodeBoarding/CodeBoarding

Looking forward to hear what you would suggest and your general opinion on the topic!

2 comments

JohnFen7mo ago

> A question for all open-source people, how do you measure these different sources of traction as I also got nice discussions under the posts.

The only measure I've found that's useful is actual engagement: real people asking real questions about the project, bug reports, help requests, that sort of thing. Tangible evidence that the project is being used.

I've found generally that things like upvotes, github stars, etc., aren't actually very good indicators of traction. They're very crude and have a very large margin of error.

imilevOP7mo ago

I understand, so you would much rather count an active Issue more valueable then few stars. I am saying active as I have seen already issues being open and as soon as a comment on my side gets in the person has disappeared, I suppose people are busy and don't have too much time for open-source anyway, so if the project doesn't run first try they give up.

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