smoochy

When you visit some new or not so new open-source project's page, whether it's on Github or maybe it has some sort of website, what makes you want to keep on reading after you glanced over the title and the first paragraph of text?

I would like to specify that I only mean content here - not presentation. So imagine there's just plaintext and browsers are not capable of displaying anything else but it.

Of course we all know that a well written documentation in general is such a rarity in this world and there are, in truth, very few examples (FreeBSD comes to mind) of documentations that stand out simply because you can sense every single sentence was written by a human passionate about it and a human caring for his reader. But how to achieve that - is quite a different question too. Let's suppose this wonderfully written documentation is there.

How does one punch through the wall of indifference with just the title, a subtitle/tagline and one paragraph? What makes you care all of a sudden, even though a minute ago you couldn't even imagine you'd want to try this piece of software or at least read more about it?