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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#31

Post by mariusor »

superdisk wrote: post #22
luke5441 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if this is the game now, you need to play it. I'm trying to get a new open source project off the ground and now I wonder if I need to buy fake stars. Or buy the cheapest kind of fake stars for my competitors so they get deleted. For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.

An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.

Haha, have you tried that? I think in this day and age marketing is much needed activity even for open-source projects providing quality solutions to problems.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#33

Post by einpoklum »

sunrunner wrote: post #19
3form wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stars have fallen to the classic problem of becoming a goal and stopping being a good metric. This can apply to your measure just as well: issues can also be gamed to be opened, closed and responded to quickly, especially now with LLMs.

Was it ever a good metric? A star from another account costs nothing and conveys nothing about the sincerity, knowledge, importance or cultural weight of the star giver. As a signal it's as weak as 'hitting that like button'. If the number of stars are in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that might correlate with a serious project. But that should be visible by real, costly activity such as…

A repository with zero stars has essentially no users. A repository with single-stars has a few users, but possibly most/all are personal acquiantances of the author, or members of the project.

It is the meaning of having dozens or hundreds of stars that is undermined by the practice described at the linked post.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#34

Post by Topfi »

luke5441 wrote: post #21
Topfi wrote: post #4

I don't know what is more, for lack of a better word, pathetic, buying stars/upvotes/platform equivalent or thinking of oneself as a serious investor and using something like that as a metric guiding your decision making process. I'd give a lot of credit to Microsoft and the Github team if they went on a major ban/star removal wave of affected repos, akin to how Valve occasionally does a major sweep across CSGO2 bann…

The problem is that if this is the game now, you need to play it. I'm trying to get a new open source project off the ground and now I wonder if I need to buy fake stars. Or buy the cheapest kind of fake stars for my competitors so they get deleted. For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.

The issue with that is, it's a game that never ends. Now you need to inflate your npm/brew/dnf installs, then your website traffic to not make it to obvious, etc.

I am not successful at all with my current projects (admittedly am not trying to be nowadays), so feel free to dismiss this advice that predates a time before LLM driven development, but in the past, I have had decent success in forums interacting with those with a specific problem my project did address. Less in stars, more in actual exchange of helpful contributions.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#35

Post by aledevv »

> VCs explicitly use stars as sourcing signals

In my opinion, nothing could be more wrong. GitHub's own ratings are easily manipulated and measure not necessarily the quality of the project itself, but rather its Popularity. The problem is that popularity is rarely directly proportional to the quality of the project itself.

I'm building a product and I'm seeing what important is the distribution and comunication instead of the development it self.

Unfortunately, a project's popularity is often directly proportional to the communication "built" around it and inversely proportional to its actual quality. This isn't always the case, but it often is.

Moreover, adopting effective and objective project evaluation tools is quite expensive for VCs.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#36

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

elashri wrote: post #29

I usually use stars as a bookmark list to visit later (which I rarely do). I probably would need to stop doing that and use my self-hosted "Karkeep" instance for github projects as well.

Never heard of it before.

https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep

Sounds useful.

I’ll star it and check it out later ;)

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#37

Post by nottorp »

Why is zero public repos a criteria?

I paid github for years to keep my repos private...

But then I don't participate in the stars "economy" anyway, I don't star and I don't count stars, so I'm probably irrellevant for this study.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#39

Post by noosphr »

sunrunner wrote: post #19
3form wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stars have fallen to the classic problem of becoming a goal and stopping being a good metric. This can apply to your measure just as well: issues can also be gamed to be opened, closed and responded to quickly, especially now with LLMs.

Was it ever a good metric? A star from another account costs nothing and conveys nothing about the sincerity, knowledge, importance or cultural weight of the star giver. As a signal it's as weak as 'hitting that like button'. If the number of stars are in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that might correlate with a serious project. But that should be visible by real, costly activity such as…

There was a time when total number of hyperlinks to a site was an amazing metric measuring its quality.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#40

Post by luke5441 »

superdisk wrote: post #22
luke5441 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if this is the game now, you need to play it. I'm trying to get a new open source project off the ground and now I wonder if I need to buy fake stars. Or buy the cheapest kind of fake stars for my competitors so they get deleted. For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.

An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.

How do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors.

My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.

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