As HN: Why is no one using my free library?

3 points by kiraken ↗ HN
I built a lightweight React guided tour library after finding existing solutions too heavy or limiting for my use case. I open-sourced it six weeks ago, but haven’t seen much adoption or attraction yet.

I'm curious to hear from others who’ve released developer tools how it works and if I should be patient with it?

The reason I want this to work is not for monetary gain, it's open source and will always remain as such. I just thought it would be nice for my resume to have a widely adopted tool, and to validate my idea for it.

Would love feedback. This is the link: https://github.com/Aladinbensassi/react-guided-tour

5 comments of 12

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 32.7 ms ] thread
Marketing is hard.

I skipped past the demo link at the top the first time I scanned through it, it could be more visible.

Find an open-source project that has a react frontend and could use a tour, and create a PR for a nice tour using your library. Be transparent that you're the author of the library and you've done this work to showcase the capabilities of it.

I personally usually dislike that kind of tour and look for the skip button as soon as I can, so I'm not sure what sort of reception you'll see, so be prepared for it to be rejected. But then you can try again somewhere else (without getting spammy)

The readme shows signs of it being written by an LLM: the use of emojis and the lists mainly.

The readme might indicate the rest of the library might also be written by an LLM. I see there's a sprinkling of emojis in comments in the example code.

How are people supposed to have heard of it at all?

What’s their incentive to switching to an unknown OSS solution that may or may not be maintained in a year, from their current stable and maintained solution?

How can they be confident your code is safe and won’t intentionally or inadvertently open backdoors on their dev machine or introduce vulnerabilities to their app?

“If you build it, they will come” only works in the movies.

stop thinking of open source as padding for resume. you'll mostly be disappointed unless you're very lucky.