How to escape the Black Hole of No Engagement?

Add-ons addons.mozilla.org
#1

My wonderfully awesome new add-on was first published over three weeks ago.

I would have thought that the number of users, from basic curiosity alone, would at least surpass the single figure mark, but instead, there has been no engagement.

Quite early on, I posted updates on twitter, youtube, and reddit, but those platforms, I suspect, are exercising a policy of suppressing small and new accounts. My posts don’t showing up on their feeds, and unless people already know my profile, they will never see my updates.

Other developers seem to be doing alright, so what am I missing?

I’ll be grateful for advise from those with experienced in this kind of publishing.

1 Like
#2

Hi

First off - I know how you feel. You put a lot of work in, but then results do not magically appear. Do not be alarmed by this - you had an idea, you made it happen. If only one other person uses it, that is fine - you have made their lives much easier.

But I can appreciate that you may want more users…which is awesome.

My top tip is to follow this guide to the letter:

Do everything this guide recommends and it will help.

It may also be the case that your add-on is just not going to be that popular. I have had it happen to me several times, and it is tough. But I turned it into a learning experience for my next add-on and made the next one even better.

I hope that this helps.

3 Likes
#3

Thanks,

Those are some good tips.

#4

ScrapBookMark ? :slight_smile:

  1. I shouldn’t be saying this but… there’s no Chome version.
  2. Are there other extensions that do the same thing?
  3. There’s Firefox Pocket.
1 Like
#5

I didn’t want to mention my extension’s name on this forum, at the risk of sounding like a shill.

ScrapBookMark is modelled on ScrapBook Plus by haselnuss. There is simply no other like it.

After resisting the transition to Firefox Quantum for some years, and sticking with Waterfox in order to continue using ScrapBook Plus, I finally decided to recreate ScrapBook Plus as part of my transition to Firefox Quantum. ScrapBookMark is the result.

Chrome doesn’t have a native sidebar (and I’ve never used chrome), but if I see reasonable demand for a chrome version, I’ll consider it.

1 Like
#6

I mean… there were at least two other (legacy) extensions like it: The original ScrapBook by Gomita, and Danny Lin’s ScrapBook X.

The latter already has a webextension successor by the original author, in the form of WebScrapBook.

(Which, after the better part of a year on the addons site, has < 7500 users and 123 reviews. So, that should help gauge the likely audience for any such extension. ScrapBook-class extensions tend to have a very passionate audience, but also an audience that is even more tiny than it is passionate.)

#7

I see what you mean.

ScrapBookMark is designed to have an intuitive and familiar UI that is, as close as possible to the original ScrapBook Plus, making it both robust in features and yet very simple to use.

Before endeavouring to create my own solution, I had tried those other incarnations, but found that they didn’t quite hit the mark, due to them having awkward UI.