I do remember a well-timed post on reddit/r/programming about Nimrod (as it was called back then), shortly after Go's release. It contained a lot of "Go is disappointing (to put it mildly), this looks so much better"-comments about the language. The backlash against Go was pretty huge.

I don't remember the guy behind Nim doing much trash-talking, which probably helped as well, especially in the long run.

EDIT: fixed derailed sentence.