[cryptica]

>> Stuff that is genuinely helpful and valueable and unique should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.

This is completely false. It depends entirely on your social network.

My main OSS project has over 5K stars on GitHub; it's used by thousands of companies and has been growing steadily but I'm certain that if it hadn't been on the front page of HN 5 years ago, nobody would be using it today. These days it accumulates more GitHub stars every day and I don't do any marketing at all. GitHub stars compound like dollars in a bank account. It got to this point because of HN. Being a useful product was just the prerequisite. There are plenty of potentially very useful products which no one will ever use because people are poorly informed.

Some niche projects are obviously useful, but there is a significant category of projects which are highly valuable but whose value is not immediately obvious; in these cases it can take years to build momentum and you NEED influencers to help you to get that once in a lifetime chance to make even a small impact in your industry.

Also, the opposite is true; there are projects that seem valuable at a glance and which can get a lot of attention (if promoted by the right influencers) but they are an anti-pattern and they provide negative value in the medium and long term.

I've seen many great projects go nowhere and I've seen really terrible projects become exceedingly popular.

The masses are not rational at all; most decisions are based on shared delusions. How many times in human history have huge amounts of people believed things that were proven to be completely false. Too many to count. There are many things that we believe today which will someday be proven to be false. Humanity has not gotten smarter over the past few decades, if anything, we've become complacent and as a result we've developed tunnel vision and have become dumber.

[ellius]

In other words, marketing is very important. I think as technical people we like to "evaluate things on merit," but the reality is that the technological complexity of our society has become such that it is virtually impossible for someone to gauge the quality of a product in a field where we're not an expert. That's part of why marketing takes on such importance.

[cryptica]

Yes it is. It's just extremely frustrating that even though people are aware of how powerful marketing is, that no one seems to acknowledge its effects on themselves and on society. Marketing doesn't create value, it redistributes existing value by creating an illusion of added value. The reality is that it takes value from a large number of small players and gives it to a few large players; and this has nothing to do with the true underlying value of the products.