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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#71

Post by nottorp »

Topfi wrote: post #42
nottorp wrote: post #37

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.

Am very much the same, took a bunch private two years ago for multitude of reasons. I can, however, see why no public repos could be a partial indicator and of concern, in conjunction with sudden star growth, simply because it is hard for a person with no prior project to suddenly and publicly strike gold. Even on Youtube it is a rare treat to stumble across a well made video by a small channel and without algos to s…

I think they're using it as a signal for the accounts doing the starring, not the account being starred...

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#72

Post by kang »

noosphr wrote: post #39
sunrunner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

at that time having a website took work, while having a github account can be cheaply used to sybil attack/signal marketing

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#73

Post by amonith »

3form wrote: post #9
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who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated.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…

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.

I especially love issues automatically "closed due to inactivity" just to keep the number of issues down :V

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#74

Post by hobofan »

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…

Unless something has changed in the last ~3 years, I think the article vastly overstates the credibility with VC's.

Even 10 years ago most VCs we spoke to had wisened up and discarded Github stars as a vanity metric.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#77

Post by tonyedgecombe »

superdisk wrote: post #70
mariusor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends what your objective is. Many people seem to see their open source projects as a stepping stone into some commercial activity. Putting aside whether that is a good idea or not if that is what they want to do then they will need to market in some way.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#78

Post by JimDabell »

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…

You are looking for different things to VCs. You are looking for markers that show software quality over the long-term. They are looking for markers that show rapidly gaining momentum over the short-term. These are often in opposition to one another.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#79

Post by rvz »

Who ever thought that GitHub stars were a legitimate measure of a project's popularity does not understand Goodhart's Law and such metrics were easily abused, faked, gamed and manipulated.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#80

Post by donatj »

I run a tiny site that basically gave a point-at-able definition to an existing adhoc standard. As part of the effort I have a list of software and libraries following the standard on the homepage. Initially I would accept just about anything but as the list grew I started wanting to set a sort of notability baseline.

Specifically someone submitted a library that was only several days old, clearly entirely AI generated, and not particularly well built.

I noted my concerns with listing said library in my reply declining to do so, among them that it had "zero stars". The author was very aggressive and in his rant of a reply asked how many stars he needed. I declined to answer, that's not how this works. Stars are a consideration, not the be all end all.

You need real world users and more importantly real notability. Not stars. The stars are irrelevant.

This conversation happened on GitHub and since then I have had other developers wander into that conversation and demand I set a star count definition for my "vague notability requirement". I'm not going to, it's intentionally vague. When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric as they say.

I don't want the page to get overly long, and if I just listed everything with X star count I'd certainly list some sort of malware.

I am under no obligation to list your library. Stop being rude.

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