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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#61

Post by az226 »

3form wrote: post #12
HighlandSpring wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a more graph oriented score that could work well here - something pagerank ish so that a repo scores better if it has issues reported by users who themselves have a good score. So it's at least a little resilient to crude manipulation attempts

It would be more resilient indeed, I think. Definitely needs a way to figure out which users should have a good score, though - otherwise it's just shifting the problem somewhat. Perhaps it could be done with a reputation type of approach, where the initial reputation would be driven by a pool of "trusted" open source contributors from some major projects. That said, I believe the core problem is that GitHub belongs…

Reputation doesn’t equal good taste in judging other projects.

There are much better ways of finding those who have good taste.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#62

Post by ethegwo »

dukeyukey wrote: post #58
ethegwo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many VCs are only doing one thing: how to use some magical quantitative metrics to assess whether a project is reliable without knowing the know-how. Numbers are always better than no numbers.

Honestly I don't know if that's true. Picking up on vibes might be better than something like GitHub stats.

When a partner decides to recommend a startup to the investment committee, he needs some explicit reasons to convince the committee, not some kind of implicit vibe

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#63

Post by ernst_klim »

I think people expect the star system to be a cheap proxy for "this is a reliable piece of sorfware which has a good quality and a lot of eyes".

I think as a proxy it fails completely: astroturfing aside stars don't guarantee popularity (and I bet the correlation is very weak, a lot of very fundamental system libraries have small number of stars). Stars also don't guarantee the quality.

And given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy. I'm teaching myself to skip the stars and skim through the code and evaluate the quality of both architecture and implementation. And I found that quite a few times I prefer a less-"starry" alternative after looking directly at the repo content.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#66

Post by scotty79 »

dafi70 wrote: post #3

Honest question: how can VCs consider the 'star' system reliable? Users who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated. A better system, but certainly not the best, would be to look at how much "life" issues have, opening, closing (not automatic), and response times. My project has 200 stars, and I struggle like crazy to update regularly…

> how can VCs consider the 'star' system reliable

I think VCs just know that there are no reliable systems, so they go with whatever's used.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#67

Post by az226 »

bjourne wrote: post #49

> The CMU researchers recommended GitHub adopt a weighted popularity metric based on network centrality rather than raw star counts. A change that would structurally undermine the fake star economy. GitHub has not implemented it. > As one commenter put it: "You can fake a star count, but you can't fake a bug fix that saves someone's weekend." I'm curious what the research says here---can you actually structurally und…

I’d say those CMU researchers are out of touch with the reality. GitHub can easily overhaul this with a much better system than what those researchers recommended but chooses not to.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#68

Post by onion2k »

ernst_klim wrote: post #63

I think people expect the star system to be a cheap proxy for "this is a reliable piece of sorfware which has a good quality and a lot of eyes". I think as a proxy it fails completely: astroturfing aside stars don't guarantee popularity (and I bet the correlation is very weak, a lot of very fundamental system libraries have small number of stars). Stars also don't guarantee the quality. And given that you can read th…

given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy

Imagine you're choosing between 3 different alternatives, and each is 100,000 LOC. Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy.

Stars isn't a good one because it's an untrusted source. Something like a referral would be much better, but in a space where your network doesn't have much knowledge a proxy like stars is the only option.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#69

Post by kortilla »

I asked Claude for an analysis on the maturity of various open source projects accomplishing the same thing. Its first searches were for GitHub star counts for each project. I was appalled at how dumb an approach that was and mortified at how many people must be espousing that equivocation online to make the training jump to that.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#70

Post by superdisk »

mariusor wrote: post #31
superdisk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.
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