My thought this morning is this.

Are people so disenfranchised by advertisements on social media that communities, even those touted as "sideproject" or "solodev", no longer have people willing to try an MVP and provide feedback on a work in progress?

I spent 2 months building an app. I went against popular advice online stating to constantly create noise on social media and built it silently... Now, trying to get one person to spend 5 minutes using it and leave a comment feels impossible.

It is nothing particularly special - a Progressive Web App calorie counter. While polished and functional, it offers no AI to snap a picture or fancy UX gimmicks to wow users on the front page.

This is the first project I have built end-to-end, and after spending over a year with courses and tutorial projects, I am excited about how it turned out. It was a great learning experience building something end-to-end and setting up a backend with payments.

But the frustration that my two months of work not only gets no traction, but is actually downvoted on a PWA support community has somewhat floored me.

I want to propose that people are too fed up with well-disguised advertisements. Too expectant that something should be completely perfect before they deign to click on it. Too committed to rapid, low-mental-bandwidth scrolling to pause and invest even a moment in genuine and helpful interaction.

It seems that the only way to get users interested in your project is to have clout in the community you ask for feedback on. But as a private person who steers clear of doom-scrolling on social media, I'm a fish out of water.

Perhaps we need to overcome our jaded perception - that not all links to projects are advertisements, but sometimes an aspiring developer desperately hoping for someone with more experience to give a warm word of encouragement. To throw them a bone, open their app for 2 minutes, and force themselves to write a few sentences of thought before continuing to scroll.