I totally agree! It doesn't matter how amazing your product is if no one ever lays eyes on it or is compelled to give it a try. I actually spent a not insignificant amount of time during and after the jam making my game as appealing as possible. I found some things that may help grab attention:

Art: Although game jams are not about the art, we are humans and are inevitably drawn to look at pretty things.

Thumbnail: It should look nice, be simple, and give a hint to the gameplay to come.

Title: A catchy sharable title goes a long way to help communicate your product and increases it's sharability.

That's what I got so far.

I've spent more time marketing my game jam game than I've actually been programming it.

Yep, I didn't realize it either, I put in probably 16 hours so far just hitting the community hard, and it's got me...40 ratings. certainly enough to get a relatively accurate average, but still, a little underwhelming.

Yeah. I agree. I find myself self promoting where I shouldn't. It's really strange. I can't control myself.

If you want to play my game, you can find it here: There's Only One True Joke

Best way to learn some community management skills, very nice social social experiment here but it's mostly based on the fact that we are all nice to each other which is really not the common case on the internet haha

The first thing I've learned post-jam: I suck at promoting my game XD
Though it's hard to judge whether your efforts are obnoxious or not. Rate threads help, but quickly become saturated.
Commenting on other's games seems to help some; I certainly try to look at the games from people commenting on mine. But not everyone will do the same; which is fair, there's 2.7k games and I doublt I've seen more than a few percent of them.

Though I have to wonder whether rate count matters in the long run: if you have 5 ratings but all were 5*s (hypothetically), would that be worth more than someone with 30, but an average of about 4*s?

Still. If this is what it's like for a small jam, a lot of effort for a few dozen people, I really feel for developers making and publishing their games on Steam and so ^^;

I've been playing other people's games these past few days, and I must say it's way better than I expected it to be. I've had lots of fun and learned some cool design tricks on the way, and I'm also happy that people are playing my game and sharing their thoughts with me.

 Sure, it may be promoting ourselves, but it's also great to learn some new skills from the people who, just like yourself, spent their last weekend hacking away to create the best possible experience they could!

Everyone's doing everything they can to stand out, and with all the people trying to stand out, no one stands out.

It's also about making your game accessible for as many as possible. If I have to choose between downloading a zip, unpacking it and executing a potentially malicious executable - or just play the game in the browser, I would choose to play the browser game all the time unless it's a game I really want to try out. Especially because I'm on a mac, which prevents me to play games only playable in windows.

In that sense participating in a local game jam is quite funny, because then you don't really have that "knowing your market" limitation. I've been to some game jams where people construct their own controllers with arduino boards or makey makey, which wouldn't have been possible to do in this game jam.

We also learned this lesson the hard way, having completely ignored the community tab or any idea of marketing, resulting in our game getting great responses both within and outside of the jam, but achieving almost zero visibility. We now have a community manager though, so in the future things should be more smooth!