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My simple GitHub project went viral (gourav.io)
332 points by deadcoder0904 on April 14, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 109 comments



I usually check r/selfhosted and awesome-selfhosted repo on GitHub[0].

[0] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted


In many cases, these clones only cover the UI, which is not trivial, but is just the tip of the iceberg.

The real challenge in these systems is to make them work at scale. In part because their business model only works at scale.

Something as simple as a "likes" counter is not trivial to do at scale.


A compilation of "at scale" code examples would be very useful to see as well. The first repo that comes to mind to start at would be Sentry's backend.


cool I guess, but this just another "list of X" repo with a bit of scrapping code behind it. I'm sure it's useful to a degree for some, but I don't see the practical value of something like this


Not only that, but I remember when this was on HN not long ago, the list is made up of random things. Some are full pieces of software, many of the 'alternatives' are actually just front ends with limited functionality or wrappers around websites or APIs.

The list never really makes it clear. I also remember some of the links were broken and overall it was pretty pointless.


This is a really click-baity title (My simple GitHub project went Viral). It should be edited.


It's the title of the original post and it's factually correct. What would your edited version be?


This "it's the original title" policy that gets thrown around a lot seems counter-productive to me by now. Someone will post an actual description of what's significant about a release, but then it gets edited to "ObscureName 1.2" which leaves you wondering: what is this? Should I care? Is it a software tool, a hardware product, can I eat it? Is it even news, a significant milestone that makes this a viable product that I'd like, or is 1.2 a version interesting for nostalgia? It tells me absolutely nothing, but yay it's the original title?

Similarly here, it tells me every little about what the post is going to be. There's a bit of what happened, but also it's a writeup of what it is and how it's made. A better title might be "How I made an Open Source Clones List go Viral on GitHub" - just off the top of my head, you can probably do better, but it would already help you figure out whether you're interested in what it has to offer before having to click.


Well, the original title policy really is an official HN rule. On the other hand, I totally agree that titles consisting only of ObscureName are not very informative. From the current front page:

1. "Bernie Madoff Dies in Prison" - who's Bernie Madoff?

2. "Deno 1.9" - what's Deno? Is it edible?

3. "Yamauchi No.10 Family Office" - I have absolutely no idea what to expect

Instead, why not write:

1. "Bernard Madoff, Mastermind of Giant Ponzi Scheme, Dies at 82" (original Bloomberg title, explains who Madoff is)

2. "Deno 1.9 (A secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript)" (short description taken from the official homepage)

3. I still have no idea what this is, maybe someone can enlighten me


What's a runtime? What's JavaScript? I'm being facetious because "of course I can google that", but then I could google Deno too.

Let's talk about how people use HN in practice on titles they don't understand. They open the thread and piece together context from the top few comments. And that's fine, it works.


The contravening point is my pet peeve on this site. Any title that starts with “How” gets that word edited out, presumably to mitigate clickbaitness, but it changes the way an article might be perceived in a way that makes it less interesting for familiar subject matter. “I did x with y” doesn’t much register to someone who knows y. But how they did it might.


Not original commenter, but maybe “Open-source clones or alternatives of popular sites”? Something more descriptive about the content.


The title is perfectly fine or at least "good enough".

HN is not like Stackoverflow with its persnickety rules. This topic generated some discussion including those who feel the title is not suitable. That's a success.

Ironic to me that the ones objecting to the title say they value the time wasted to "click" but then write sentences explaining why that time was wasted. So x seconds to click and figure out you don't like the title and then 10x seconds to write a critique? Maybe just ignore it next time and move on with life?


> ignore it next time and move on with life?

You're making it sound as if this is about a single person clicking a single link and skimming until they find the necessary context (say, 15 seconds) to judge whether they want to continue reading, versus debating a topic in a subthread (minutes). Obviously, the actual point is that everyone needs to click many links whenever they visit HN and is continously sinking that time for as many useless titles as are being posted or as they can be bothered to click through on. (If needing to click to find out what it's about is fine, we should browse HN with only the stories' rank and no title at all.) We could instead choose to not religiously stick to applying a guideline on using the original title. After all, I would also like:

> HN [to not be] like Stackoverflow with its persnickety rules.


But if HN sticks hard to the original title rule. How is it not persnickety?


>This is a really click-baity title

Well, how else do you think they got a list of links put together in a github repo, to become viral in first place!


I don't think you know what clickbait means. The title describes what he did perfectly without any addition.


s/click-baity/karma-farmy


Not the clones. Its more like a clickbait title. And its not a project or product but just a listing,it could have been better as a blog post.


40k visits and only 1 donation. Not that I complain or that I think he deserves more or less, just interesting to see the ratio.


Well, from the post:

> Last month (Mar'21), I made a simple project

It's not like anyone's been using the product long-term or as if individual users incur a significant cost, and the author hasn't been asking to help with hosting costs or anything.

I don't usually donate right upon finding a random fun project, unless I incurred costs (by doing a significant computation or if it sent a number of SMSes or so) for the person who hosts it. I donate to things like the Internet Archive or OpenStreetMap because they have real hosting costs, or the K9 mail client because there's a lot of coding that needs doing, I would like it to be done, and someone's offering to do it for crowdfunded money. Or sci-hub, because the owner gave up a lot to make it happen and I think it has had a net positive effect in the world.

There are other projects I've donated to and more reasons I'd donate, but generally I don't find this weirdly low for this kind of project and also not representative of what you could expect if you do create something that'll require donations, provided it 'goes viral' to the same extent as this project.


Anecdotal, but I have a niche calculator SPA that fluctuates between 1k-10k visitors per month. Most visitors are frequent fliers.

My donation button (top center of page) has only been used once over the span of 5 years, even though it gets praised across various forums and communities within the niche.


That's roughly what I'd expect?

An easy way to estimate this: think of how many websites you visit a year, then divide the number of donations you make per year by that.

If this number isn't zero, you're a statistical outlier.


I had a similar experience with one of my GitHub repos [0] that is currently 9k+ stars. I added donation link when it was about 5k stars (after it went viral courtesy HN). But this was before GitHub sponsors. I removed donation links after I got only a single donation in about a year.

I had much better results when I started converting my tutorials into ebooks and sold them. Obviously having a paid product is different, but I'm referring to the paid sales I got whenever I put up 'pay what you want' offer.

[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...


I got 100k visits for my project https://reallyconfused.co/ and 0 donations because my donation link was broken and I noticed it too late...


Honestly, you should charge actual money for this.

Not a bad idea at all, plus the templates you already have are pretty neat. I could see applications w.r.t. professional development or even marketing to product people with the purpose of simplifying product roadmaps (and sharing with C-levels, etc.).

You have something here, screw donations. Free users suck anyway; my free project[1] has ~1500 MAU and I kind of want to stop working on it because the entitlement is unreal.

[1] https://www.lofi.rocks/


That's what I'm intending on doing next! I'm trying to find distribution channels to reach out first and to validate some ideas I have in mind. Would you like to hop on a quick call to brainstorm stuff?


Hey, I think some other stuff might be broken too. When I open this link I get a bunch of errors in the console: https://reallyconfused.co/roadmap/from-c#-to-asp.net-develop...

This was also the first course in the list, so not exactly a good first impression.

The console lists this: https://pastebin.com/KQqjdCc8


Thanks for pointing them out! I'm taking the site through some changes so these bugs are very recent. When I released it, it was pretty much bug-free.


Zero hosting cost, zero added value, why would you donate anything for a project like this ?


Someone put their time into creating it? Also perhaps because it is useful to people and if we ever hope to keep good content coming, without having to suffer through endless ads, we should support, what we deem to be good content.


The "clones" listed in this project is what I deem to be good content, i.e actual creative work that took much more time and effort than putting together yet another "awesome-whatever" list. That is what I would support.


> Someone put their time into creating it?

This is not in itself a reason to pay for stuff.

> Also perhaps because it is useful to people and if we ever hope to keep good content coming, without having to suffer through endless ads, we should support, what we deem to be good content.

This sentence seems self-contradicting in relation to the article existing. Assuming we think that the project from the article is in fact good, it follows that good content is already coming even if we don't pay for it.

A small case could be made that perhaps this was an experiment by the author and we want to reward this to create positive reinforcement, but an equally valid argument could be made that paying for this type of aggregator content will create a mass of buzzfeed style "list of awesome X" aggregation websites. Monetization tends to create perverse incentives, after all.


OK, point taken, that only because anyone puts time into something, does not mean it is a reason to pay for it.

I disagree with the second point though. In the end people need to put food on the table and I for one am glad, if people can do so by doing things they enjoy and that add value to society. If I like some project and I see, that it was only enabled by people putting forward effort, even though they are not paid to do so initially, then I often think about supporting them. My idea of a good future is, that more people can add value to society not in the jobs they do not like to do, but instead in the projects they would like to do and can live from that. I don't think it is a small case. In fact I think this is what should happen more often, so that we get away from a model, where everything is measured in how much it costs and towards a model, in which people show how much value things brought them, by supporting creators.

I think this would help reducing gaps in society. Someone who can not afford to give a lot can still make use of things, while someone who can give a lot is able to support more people.

It reaches into every area of our lives. Currently we have social media networks, where the users are the product sold. Instead we could have social media, where users, who can afford to support, give in order to keep the service alive and running. There are already people, who crowd-finance their Mastodon instances and work (time working on) those and similar projects.

Maybe this is something that is quite far from our reality right now, but at least I am seeing some cases of it in projects, that I support.


> Someone put their time into creating it?

That's not an intrinsically valuable act.


How does curating a list, a list that at least 7500 people found worthy of visiting and starring and 550 people forked, count as "zero added value"?

What exactly would qualify as "added value" in your mind?


Something you’d donate to.


The problem is that you assume that services/projects that contribute more value gets more donations (or vice-versa) while the donations mostly come in based on how well you market the service/project instead.


Aggregation and curation lists have implicit value.

You are reading these posts on such a thing right now.


People star these lists because it's a way of bookmarking them for later reference. If I had only 5$ to spare I'd rather donate them to one of the authors of the actual projects.


It's such a lame hustle to market your free widget, then complain that nobody paid for it.

It's literally a con to pull on tourists

Not saying you are personally doing this, since you specifically said you're not complaining, just my feelings on the matter.


This roughly matches my experience. Donations amount to around 50€ per 100k visitors on my website. The donation button is next to the "ask a question" button, which yields about 30 emails per month (and 60+ emails to other experts). The average time on page exceeds 5 minutes for some guides.

Donations just aren't that common.


Not disagreeing with you at all. There are many many projects, that run on time and dedication of their creators and which deserve more.


the way I see it is that anyone who contributes to open source likely utilizes open source.

Think of the market value for some of the open tools you use and how much they would cost you that you instead get for free.

To me, that's the payment you get even before you contribute.


now it went viral and what is the real impact?

It will end in one of many started github repos, you might rememeber it but most people don't need to look up a clone.

While i like that we appreachiate small things, sometimes i do wonder if it would have saved more time if we wouldnt do things.

I have to find a weekly hn newsletter system.


> I have to find a weekly hn newsletter system.

https://hackernewsletter.com/


Is this still active? The current issue example links an issue from 2019


yes, still active. At least, I got last newsletter last Sunday


Its not using the top voted per day but its handpicked :(


To many, virality is confused with impact. They won the game.

No issues with what the author made. But chasing virality is empty. I don’t know if the author was doing that.


Hate to pick on a typo, but I had to laugh. “Scrapping Reddit” is exactly how I added two hours back to my day.


author here. lol, Grammarly didn't pick this. (En is not my native language). Thanks for informing, fixed it.


Note that Grammarly is essentially a keylogger. The content you're typing gets sent to their servers. It doesn't work like your typical client-side spellchecker.

Their business model may be OK, it's just something that you need to be aware of (and a lot of people I've talked to aren't).

From the privacy policy:

---

We collect this information as you use the Site, Software, and/or Services:

- User Content. This consists of all text, documents, or other content or information uploaded, entered, or otherwise transmitted by you in connection with your use of the Services and/or Software. For more information about how we care for and protect your User Content, please see our User Trust Guidelines.


As an alternative there is LanguageTool[†], for which you can run your own server so the data isn't given to an extra party at all. We've been using it in [DayJob] for a while, and I use it at home too, and it does a decent job.

From my relatively experience of Grammarly (I had an account a couple of years ago) a self-hosted instance of LT is slightly better than Grammarly "free" but doesn't have the extra analysis offered by Grammarly's paid accounts.

[†] https://languagetool.org/


I do this too (running it in a docker container on my server to mutualise usage across several devices) and it suffice for catching the main errors and typos. Quite happy with it.

Can indeed be recommended as substitute to grammarly free.


They had a serious issue that would allow other sites to access your texts. Found by taviso from google project-zero.

I give them the credit that they fixed it within hours, but should the project-zero team fill in for their testing team ? :-) https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=15...


No need to install browser extension. You can go to app.grammarly.com paste your text and spell-check it. Works great.


No doubt it works great - but I'm not convinced this addresses the claim that it's "essentially a key logger". With your suggestion, they're still getting the data.


I hope everyone assumes this by default of any web forms. I always wince a little when a colleague uses some random website to pretty-print json or encode base64. Great way to leak company internal stuff.


I built a (diff) app that doesn't, but I have no idea how to promote that without making people even more suspicious.


People who care a lot about protecting their data probably won't use it anyway. Even if your intentions are pure, your implementation could have a security vulnerability. It makes a nice bullet point feature but I'm not sure it has much promotional value beyond that.


This is what holds me back. Thanks for helping other see this.


In case you miss my longer replay to the parent post:

You could try a locally self-hosted instance of https://languagetool.org/ to avoid sending all your online typing to an extra party.


It’s only self hosted when you have more then 250 users :(


There's the open source part of it: https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

Not sure if it's missing any notable features of the SAAS product.


Oh thats awesome! i'll take a look, thanks


The sentence is grammatically correct and it would be wrong for a grammar checker to flag it.

It just doesn't mean what you intended :)


I know AI hasn't gotten that powerful yet. That was a sarcastic comment about Grammarly :)


Wow! You have just made me aware of a potentially good use of Grammarly.

Until now I had assumed Grammarly was for people who should have learned to write better in school. I wonder if there's a Dutch Grammarly? :P


Haha, today I read in another place "police defectives" instead of detectives. In my defence, the article was about a police error.


I have had people getting almost violent arguingit is scrapping and not scraping. Especially from Asia and East Europe ( I have done 1000s of scraping projects over the past 20+ years, working with people all over the earth ).

It is fairly normal to have people on Fivver and Upwork tell you 'I can make the web scrapper for u' when discussing a project.


I'm a native English speaker but I have to admit that the spelling difference is not logical. Scrapping is fine but scraping should really be "scraeping" to make it's pronunciation clearer.


Vowel-consonant-vowel often elongates the first vowel: bate, gene, line, tone, puma. A second consonant usually breaks the elongation: batter, gentoo, linnet, tonne, pummel. (There are plenty of exceptions.)


It's entirely consistent with the regular rules of spelling and vowel length. Compare taping vs. tapping.


My point isn't that it does not adhere to the rule, but rather that the rule in this case was comparatively less intuitive.


I'm gonna have to ask you to show your work.


I vote for ckraipyng.


weirdly enough, most Indian devs I come across write (and say) "Scrapping" for some reason. I gave up on trying to correct them. (Obv I'm indian too)


I suffer something similar in Brazil, I've of the most famous words like this is paint, most people here day it like pint


I actually see that same typo or misspelling a lot. I suspect sometimes it is an non-EFL issue.


we have code with "scrapedData"ish variables everywhere, I still have to double check the p's every time i make one ;)


Really loving this! As someone who also made clones of bigger software (usually with lesser functionality, because I was focussing on the main thing) I look forward into searching that list to find solutions of others.


It really makes sense to use one of these clones for creating new products IF license permits it and if they are implementing a lot of required functionality. For example making a website for campsites would probably be 90% finished if an Airbnb's clone's code were used.

Just as we wouldn't think to implement Quicksort 10 or 20 years ago, because we have great, optimized reusable components, this is the next logical step: Focussing on building the 10% that differentiate the product instead of reinventing the wheel.


... wait, what?

I use the sort function of a standard library because it has been written by seasoned devs, reviewed, rewritten; use known algorithms and practices; and being part of a well known standard library it has a chance of still being maintained, distributed and available ten years from now on.

I don't know how you can even remotely compare that to an unmaintained code dump that someone made as a learning experiment over the week.

I'm not dissing on theses kinds of code release, they are great to learn from, but I would find it a bit foolish to base your whole product on it.


My point was about the general idea of reusing what has been done before. I agree with you that there are qualitative differences, no doubt about it.


They're often (or mostly?) UI mock-ups not clones. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425233


Wait, why is Woocommerce listed as a clone of Shopify!



merged. Thanks. power of collaboration.


There are a lot of weird "clones". I wouldn't say that Matomo is a Google Analytics clone, until recently it didn't even have an import function. I wouldn't say that Bitwarden is a LastPass clone. It's simply a different end-to-end encrypted server based password manager, there are a few of them.


Maybe I'm ignorant, but what's the difference to e.g. https://alternativeto.net/

Or should be more better rephrased: It's a open source clone of AlternativeTo.


This is just a compilation readme, not a real code project like I thought. dev.to bait


The other day I was searching for examples of large apps done using specific technologies(RealWorld is great, but not large enough), even entertaining the idea of buying something from Themeforest, but this is better.


Just wait until your project gets copied and then goes to the front page - I've had it done.


So what? List posts are about the least creative, effortless and worthless content on the Internet.

The bar for what is considered achievements is constantly lowered.

HN no longer gets interesting submissions, just drivel.


At least list posts are a step above pointless complaints.

If you think that HN needs better submissions, you can submit things yourself. Or spent time looking through new submissions and voting up the ones that you like. Then show up and leave thought-provoking comments on articles.

All are more productive than complaining about someone creating yet another list that was interesting enough for thousands of people to star.


I have submitted plenty.


[flagged]


> hordes of wannabe frontend devs

Classic HN gatekeeping, this is so unnecessarily degrading. Everyone starts somewhere, and like it or not, making clones is a very good way to learn about the basics of web dev. If they make a good clone and want to share it and get feedback, what's the harm?


In my experience, those who moan about the simplicity of others' work are the least likely to release something of their own.

Not everything needs to have a machine learning moon-rocket-launching cryptomining discombobulator to be useful and a job well done.


You misread his comment. He's bemoaning wannaba devs creating these readme "projects" not the owners of the actual clone projects that actually do require programming skills.

I agree with him, these readme compilation things are just dev.to bait


If you think "janitorial" work with zero coding is unimportant I assume you were never involved in any project that's a little too big for a single programmer doing everything. And what's so bad about making potentially interesting projects more visible?


Compilations are derivatives of original work. There is nothing inherently wrong with compilations being more popular but the effort put into it is much less. Clicks don't take effort or other metrics into account.

Thinking about this more deeply raises more questions: What is effort? Is it measured in time or competence needed? Is promoting less effort? How could it be achieved that the credit distributes adequately across original work and derivatives?


I hate hate hate doing "janitorial" work and thus I feel really happy when somebody does janitorial work in such a helpful and useful way. Not sure where this falls on the "proudness" scale, but it doesn't really matter.


What an absolutely horrible sentiment. Just because this is not something you'd consider doing does not mean it's not something someone can feel proud of.


It's not technically complex but it shows that he recognized a need for something in the community and provided a solution with proof that people liked it. A software developer is way more than just a coder; which many people seem to forget.


This[0] might be the reason why :)

[0]: https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/


> This is mostly janitorial work with zero coding

not everything in life is coding?


it shadows the real coding works on github


Why did you change my scrollbar though on this site? :|




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