Comment by luke5441
9 hours ago
The problem is that if this is the game now, you need to play it. I'm trying to get a new open source project off the ground and now I wonder if I need to buy fake stars. Or buy the cheapest kind of fake stars for my competitors so they get deleted.
For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.
The issue with that is, it's a game that never ends. Now you need to inflate your npm/brew/dnf installs, then your website traffic to not make it to obvious, etc.
I am not successful at all with my current projects (admittedly am not trying to be nowadays), so feel free to dismiss this advice that predates a time before LLM driven development, but in the past, I have had decent success in forums interacting with those with a specific problem my project did address. Less in stars, more in actual exchange of helpful contributions.
An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.
How do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors.
My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.
How will fake stars help it getting of the ground?
Haha, have you tried that? I think in this day and age marketing is much needed activity even for open-source projects providing quality solutions to problems.
I maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.
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