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