@ShenHuang: The number of stars an open-source project gets has nothing to do with code quality, release timing, or even features. WhaleBro's DeepSeek-TUI May 1 tweet got 375K views and 900 stars, while my similar open-source product OpenSeek got 51K views and 70 stars on its post yesterday...

Open-source projects not getting stars has nothing to do with code quality, release timing, or even features.

Whale哥’s DeepSeek-TUI post on 5/1 got 375K views and 900 stars. My own similar open-source product, OpenSeek, got 51K views and 70 stars from yesterday’s post — the conversion rates are almost identical (~0.14% vs ~0.24%).

The difference is the 7x reach, plus the subsequent chain reaction and monetization.

In the comments on my own post yesterday, there was a very valuable reply: telling me to go back and look at Whale哥’s posting history.

In his first 90 days, he posted 60+ projects, none of which got over 100 stars. What he was actually doing during those 3 months wasn’t writing code — it was showing up every day in the comment sections of big accounts on X to build familiarity.

1/ 60–90 days in advance, leave high-density comments under the posts of 5–10 big accounts that your target audience reads daily. Not to introduce features — to make people on the timeline remember who you are. And to drop your own GitHub link.

2/ Pick an identity tag within the community (like Whale哥’s “American guy” cultural contrast), so others can introduce you to a friend in one sentence.

3/ On launch day, the main post only tells your identity story + one line of product value. Don’t dump a feature list — big accounts repost identity, not product value itself.

4/ The 24–48h window for Chinese media / community relay. Then the subsequent commercialization opportunity.

The essence: it’s the seeds you planted in the comments of big accounts over the past 3 months. Did you really expect to go viral on cold-start launch day?

Shen Huang (@ShenHuang): Testing the cultural confidence of the Chinese-speaking sphere.

The author of a DeepSeek TUI project posts two sentences in Chinese on X, comes to China once. The project gets 30K stars.

I’ve been learning Chinese for decades and visit China every year.

I work on Harness in Google’s AI mode. My distilled version, DeepSeek TUI - openseek, has only 5 stars — one from myself, one from a friend.

Why.