Yo, my rubygems.org profile has just hit 10,000 downloads!
I'm guessing that 99% of these downloads are bots though ...
Although not entirely ... the gems at the bottom of the list are either very recent (rspec_numbering_formatter), or kinda utterly pointless (ageism). On average, older gems have more downloads. Top of the list is protopack, which is actually useful as a way to store objects as YAML for later resurrection, kind of like test fixtures, but in a production context, with liberal meta-data sprinkled on top. You would think that sepa would end up being most popular though, as it's made for a critical bit of business - preparing SEPA direct debits, using the ISO 20022 xml standard (also known as "pain.008.001", although all banking standards are a pain so in this case "pain" is banking shorthand for "payments initiation"). It's newer than protopack though, so time will tell.
One more piece of data: none of the corresponding github repositories have issues opened. There are several ways to interpret this:
- an army of bots is dedicated to downloading my stuff and archiving for posterity it all over the internet, but they don't take any more interest beyond downloading
- real people download my stuff, decide it's unusable, and run away fast
- real people download my stuff, it fits their needs perfectly and is 100% defect-free, and they're using it happily
Please feel free to draw your own conclusions. Then colour them in.
