I got gently admonished on here a while back for mentioning that I find those star graph things people put on their READMEs to have entirely the opposite effect than that which was intended. I see one of those and I'm considerably less likely to trust the project because a) you're chasing a stupider metric than lines of code, and b) people obviously buy stars.
GitHub's fake star economy
81–90 of 403 posts
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#82The stick of God doesn't make sound. God's work indeed
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#83I 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 o…
> Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy.
100k is small, but you're right, it can be millions. I usually skim through the code tho, and it's not that hard. I don't need to fully read and understand the code.
What I look at is: high-level architecture (is there any, is it modular or one big lump of code, how modular it is, what kind of modules and components it has and how they interact), code quality (structuring, naming, aesthetics), bus factor (how many people contribute and understand the code base).
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#84Earlier 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.
I especially love issues automatically "closed due to inactivity" just to keep the number of issues down :V
Sometimes people open issues without proper information. It cant be replicated and nobody else is jumping in that it affects them. You may suspect its something else, maybe with their environment, but if they don't engage what else can you do? Tell them you are closing it and specify what kind of info you need if they ever get around to providing it and it can be reopened.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#85I 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…
The issues page used to be good for this as well. What kind of problems people are having.
(Sometimes still is, but the agents garbage does not help)
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#86> 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 inst…
Vast majority of mid level experienced people take stars very seriously and they won't use anything under 100 stars. I'm not supporting this view but it is what it is unfortunately. VCs that invest based on stars do know something I guess or they are just bad investors. IMO using projects based on start count is terrible engineering practice.
I've seen the same devs refuse to use a library because the last commit was 3 months ago, despite the library being extremely popular, battle tested, and existing for 10 years.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#87We're this close to rediscovering pagerank
I was literally was just looking at GitHub dataset availability and musing on this. A star from karpathy is worth a lot more than a star from open_claw_dood that just created his account 5 min ago.
In general, I’ve been dissatisfied with GitHub’s code search. It would be nice to see innovation here.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#88These kinds of articles make you feel like there are specific, actionable problems that just need an adjustment and then they disappear. However, the system is much worse than you'd expect. Studies like this are extremely valuable, but they don't address the systematic problems affecting all signaling channels: most signals themselves have been manufactured into a product.
Build a SaaS and you'll have "journalists" asking if they can include you in their new "Top [your category] Apps in [current year]", you just have to pay $5k for first place, $3k for second, and so on (with a promotional discount for first place, since it's your first interaction).
You'll get "promoters" offering to grow your social media following, which is one reason companies may not even realize that some of their own top accounts and GitHub stars are mostly bots.
You'll get "talent scouts" claiming they can find you experts exactly in your niche, but in practice they just scrape and spam profiles with matching keywords on platforms like LinkedIn once you show interest, while simultaneously telling candidates that they work with companies that want them.
And in hiring, you'll see candidates sitting in interview farms quite clearly in East Asia, connecting through Washington D.C. IPs, present themselves with generic European names, with synthetic camera backgrounds, who somehow ace every question, and list experience with every technology you mention in the job post in their CVs already (not hyperbole, I've seen exactly this happen).
If a metric or signal matters, there is already an ecosystem built to fake it, and faking it starts to be operational and just another part of doing business.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Specifically if those avatars are cute anime girls. I know you are half joking/not joking, but this is definitely a golden signal.
Positive or negative to you? Whenever I see more than one anime-adjacent profile picture I duck out.
Positive ofc, most of them a top-tier Rust devs.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#90These kinds of articles make you feel like there are specific, actionable problems that just need an adjustment and then they disappear. However, the system is much worse than you'd expect. Studies like this are extremely valuable, but they don't address the systematic problems affecting all signaling channels: most signals themselves have been manufactured into a product. Build a SaaS and you'll have "journalists" a…
It all boils down to making more money.