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Comment by adim86 | Hacker News Reader

I think the first points are the most salient. Developers undervalue the skill of marketing and sales frequently. It is one of the most powerful secondary skillsets a creator needs. If you are unable to inspire, trust and expertise you will forever have a hard time selling your product. I wrote a post on this area just a couple hours ago and what mindset can help fix that: http://blog.adimofunne.com/no-one-gives-a-shit/

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Funny story. On my last 2 day hack project [1] I was really concerned about "no-one-gives-a-shit". So the last project I created something everyone wants: You trade Github stars. Even though the users loved it, it will not spread because on any forum/twitter/channel it is down voted almost immediately. Even though people do give a shit - the group that hates the project drowns it out.

https://www.gitstarred.com

I'm not trying to be inflammatory but I think the first issue that comes to mind is that giving stars at random kind of circumvents the meaning of stars.

The the reason this is disliked is pretty obvious IMO. It's undermining the value of stars as an indicator of a projects health / usefullness. People explore tools and libraries on GitHub to incorporate into the work they do at their jobs. If this were to take off it could potentially make everyones job harder, yikes!

Yeah, you raise a good point here, sometimes enemies of your product can suppress it, so it is more complex than just creating what people want sometimes. To be specific about your product, even though people want it, it feels like it is for the wrong reasons. If your product succeeds it devalues GitHub stars which is a metric taken seriously by the GitHub community. So (unintentionally) you have attacked the values of the Github community and this is why you are getting some backlash. Also, unfortunately, I think many of the people that would love your product are the people I am talking about in my post above, they are not good at selling their product or project so they try and game the system that elevates good projects. So its a short-term solution of sorts, that crowd will be better off actually learning how to market their projects than gaming systems

It's something a particular group already does, and wants to be more efficient about, but its clearly an abusive act that totally undermines the system in question. You're taking this operation, and pushing it out into the limelight.. the reaction of everyone outside the group in question should have been obvious.

It's like targeting the market of murderers, and giving them a better toolkit particular to their operations, and complaining that everyone who isn't your market is hating it and drowning out the product's value.

If you're going to help people do something widely reviled, then do it in secret.

I enjoyed your blog post, it touches on an important point that I find myself getting caught in. Explaining what I'm building in a technical manner or with a logical description that doesn't address what people really care about, "how will this product help me (save me time/money)?"

Hahaha, glad you liked it

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