# GitHub Traffic Illusion

By [Nathaniel Hall](https://paragraph.com/@d3nathaniel) · 2025-05-12

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I have two open source projects—one published under an organization, the other under my personal account. The organization project got a few tweets to drive traffic; the personal one had no promotion at all. Yet both have similar traffic.

![https://d3e0luujhwn38u.cloudfront.net/resized/aUFQJ7TJ6k_p8g8Ewds13sH7fX3Ftk5PlpJQdhx9_E0/s:3200/plain/s3://typefully-user-uploads/img/original/217055/b3bac515-3a6e-4386-9177-d175181e9eaa.png](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/bfdbd936e0767c0e599677c81d9fe3b4.png "https://d3e0luujhwn38u.cloudfront.net/resized/aUFQJ7TJ6k_p8g8Ewds13sH7fX3Ftk5PlpJQdhx9_E0/s:3200/plain/s3://typefully-user-uploads/img/original/217055/b3bac515-3a6e-4386-9177-d175181e9eaa.png")

![https://d3e0luujhwn38u.cloudfront.net/resized/f_3U0ST9zBF4GpDJFAVlNHZY8sS8aN5C6HgY50uhWS8/s:3200/plain/s3://typefully-user-uploads/img/original/217055/6b4fb573-4777-41b6-87fb-cba3f5dd6742.png](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/eb9df4599e0943f094358d436c30243a.png "https://d3e0luujhwn38u.cloudfront.net/resized/f_3U0ST9zBF4GpDJFAVlNHZY8sS8aN5C6HgY50uhWS8/s:3200/plain/s3://typefully-user-uploads/img/original/217055/6b4fb573-4777-41b6-87fb-cba3f5dd6742.png")

It feels like GitHub has too many spiders, creating an illusion of popularity for open source projects. I’m not sure how GitHub’s recommendation algorithm works, but maybe like X (Twitter), you only get trickles of traffic by jumping on trending topics.

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*Originally published on [Nathaniel Hall](https://paragraph.com/@d3nathaniel/github-traffic-illusion)*