Hacker News: charm137

New comment by charm137 in "Ask HN: How do you build organic traction as an indie dev?"

charm137 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:33:21 +0000

Yes. And it's rather dry and technical. Good advice on the "interesting anecdotes" / story aspect of it.

New comment by charm137 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

charm137 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:29:45 +0000

It's astounding that the thought to dissociate one of the mathematicians from the proposed publication was driven by their corporate institutional affiliation - and that that exclusion was suggested by a scientist themselves! This is like a researcher from CMU saying to an NYU researcher that their collaborator, being from MIT, is a problem - this is as ridiculous as that!

Progress in humanity's knowledge now has to play second fiddle to narrow corporate interests as IPO timings near (both of which wouldn't exist anyway if generations of mathematicians hadn't paved the way for AIs to become as good as they have).

New comment by charm137 in "Ask HN: How do you build organic traction as an indie dev?"

charm137 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 11:16:50 +0000

Thank you. That indeed appears to be the best approach. Judging by some other comments here, I sense many people here (just like much of the internet) are just angry by default for some reason and assume no prior effort on the part of the poster rather than offer solutions to what is a legitimate business problem.

Ask HN: How do you build organic traction as an indie dev?

charm137 — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:29:31 +0000

I have recently become a fulltime indie gamedev.

While I'm willing to trust myself on technical and creative output, the topic of getting the word out that I might release something interesting and worth people's time seems to have become increasingly daunting. Most popular technical channels like HN / specific sub-reddits require active community participation and "karma-farming" just to be able to post something, which is hard for me to spend time on (I'd rather work on my stuff). Twitter(X) / Bluesky have low visibility for gamedev topics. All text-focused websites seem to have become really hard organic marketing channels especially after AI slop came in.

IG / Tiktok / Twitch would be channels I'd rather use when I get into the actual spending-marketing-dollars mode (i.e., inorganic; which is also when I'd get into Steam / App Store level marketing as well).

So far, Youtube seems to be the one place where the algorithm might not be quite as punitive as the gates that other places have put up, but it's not a place for getting high-quality feedback (surprisingly videos on LinkedIn do rather well - on engagement but not sure that's the right channel).

What do folks here in a similar situation do?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580353

Points: 7

# Comments: 7

New comment by charm137 in "Half-Baked Product"

charm137 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:48:09 +0000

There are two fundamental problems: one is the inability to admit mistakes and shed the false aura of omniscience in front of customers, investors or employees. The second (almost a corollary of the first) is overpromising and, as a result, underdelivering because those who face the customers/investors want to appear infallible.