How do you promote you repositories on github so that they get lots of stars? about ama

[mxcl]

I think nowadays I have it easy, since I have nearly 20,000 followers on Twitter. But I succeeded before I had followers, for example, I was a nobody before Homebrew, but I managed to get that to thousands of stars (well strictly it was released before stars, so forks) over a period of a few months.

I released Homebrew and nobody noticed in 2009. I kept working on it, and it had a great README, I tweeted about it and nobody noticed. In the end the thing that got it moving and attention was replying to a https://superuser.com post and thoroughly answering the question and pitching Homebrew.

Then it started getting talked about and people started noticing it, and posting it on forums and news boards and Twitter, etc.

When I released PromiseKit I only had 600 followers, yet it got 1000 stars in a week. This was because it was a much needed tool, and it had a few neat features nobody had thought of before (flexible objc closures using ABI analysis to figure out the content). It was featured on all the iOS mailers. I did barely any advertising.

Nowadays even though I have all these followers my repos don’t get lots of stars unless they are generally useful and have good READMEs, I've proved this quite a few times with some half-arsed attempts at projects that only gained a few stars, despite me having it easy with social media presence.

So make it good, make sure the README is super good, try to get featured on the weekly mailers for your platform and you will probably need to find marketing avenues yourself. Find StackOverflow posts where people are looking for your tool or library and answer the question and finally pitch your new thing.