I paid people to try and follow my README
- ID
- 34242
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 11 Oct 2026, 7:47 PM
- Fetched
- 12 Oct 2026, 12:27 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/10/i-paid-people-to-try-and-follow-my-readme/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 12 Oct 2026, 12:28 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
Terence Eden paid participants €25 each for an hour to attempt following his ActivityBot README on a video call while thinking aloud, spending roughly €150 total as part of an NLnet grant application for the project. After each session he revised the README and re-tested with the next person, and the sessions surfaced concrete failures: the demo tool link was wrong, the README never explained what the software actually does, jokes confused readers, quoting rules and hidden-file renaming were unexplained, section ordering was confusing, and web server permission behaviour was assumed to be uniform. The Hacker News thread drew 206 points and 107 comments.
Why it matters
If you maintain a README, install guide, or onboarding doc, this is a cheap, repeatable procedure with a known price: ~€25 per tester for an hour, ~€150 for a round, revising between sessions. It found defects that reading your own docs cannot surface — a broken demo link, unexplained quoting requirements, and the absence of a plain statement of what the software does — so the decision is to budget a small amount for paid think-aloud testing (and to check your README renders and makes sense in a terminal, not just on GitHub) before your next release or launch, rather than asking an LLM to simulate users.
Discussion angle
Compare paid human think-aloud testing against LLM-simulated user testing: what did real testers catch here (wrong demo link, no explanation of what the tool does, confusing jokes, quoting rules) that a simulated user probably would not, and what would a €150 testing budget buy your team versus a week of internal doc review?