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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#91

Post by tsylba »

Personally I use stars in two ways: 1) It's interesting and I want to keep track of it for possible future use and 2) It's a fantastic idea and kudos to you even if I'll never use it.

As a side note it's kind of disheartening that everytime there is a metric related to popularity there would be some among us that will try to game it for profit, basically to manipulate our natural bias.

As a side note it's always a bit sad how the parasocial nature of the modern web make us like machine interfacing via simple widgets, becoming mechanical robot ourselves rationalising IO via simple metrics kind of forgetting that the map is never the territory.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#92

Post by philipallstar »

vachina wrote: post #90
gobdovan wrote: post #88

These 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.

Of course - money is a good proxy for value in these instances. Not perfect, but good.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#93

Post by embedding-shape »

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.

Yeah, the time between Google appeared, until the time SEO became a concept people chased, a very brief moment of time.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#94

Post by mentalgear »

> VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction

Why am I not surprised big Capital corrupts everything. Also, Goodhart's law applies again: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

HN Folks: What reliant, diverse signals do you use to quickly eval a repo's quality? For me it is: Maintenance status, age, elegance of API and maybe commit history.

PS: From the article:

> instead tracks unique monthly contributor activity - anyone who created an issue, comment, PR, or commit. Fewer than 5% of top 10,000 projects ever exceeded 250 monthly contributors; only 2% sustained it across six months.

> [...] recommends five metrics that correlate with real adoption: package downloads, issue quality (production edge cases from real users), contributor retention (time to second PR), community discussion depth, and usage telemetry.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#95

Post by utopiah »

donatj wrote: post #80

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 generat…

> When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric as they say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#96

Post by dukeyukey »

ethegwo wrote: post #62
dukeyukey wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But given the amount of astroturfing and star-buying out there, relying on star counts may well select for deceptive founders.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#97

Post by mapmeld »

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…

Making the conversations about VCs expecting thousands of stars, is thinking too big. It's probably more often someone pays $20 to make one of their projects look good, for their CV, for vanity, thinking this will get them the push that they need to get clicks on reddit, or noticed over some other open source project. If there is someone offering a 10k star project an investment over 8k without looking at the project or revenue potential, I can only think they are clueless, or picking a student project to fund each summer.

The fake accounts often star my old repos to look like real users. They are usually very sketchy if you think for a minute, for example starring 5,000 projects in a month and no other GitHub activity. One time I found a GitHub Sponsor ring, which must be a money laundering / stolen credit cards thing?

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#98

Post by ricardo81 »

lkm0 wrote: post #15

We're this close to rediscovering pagerank

It'd ideally be more of a peoplerank though. I think Google discovered this problem themselves when Pagerank became a well known thing.

You'd want to discard a lot of the noise in the bottom 20% of linking power. You want to focus more on the 'trust' factor.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#99

Post by hnmullany »

I came across one of these in 2018 with a "hot" open source company raising a Series B. An impressive star ramp (about 300% YoY growth) before the (high-priced/competitive) raise and three months later Github had revoked almost all the star growth from the previous year, resulting in a 20% YoY record. The company eventually got acquihired.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#100

Post by readthedangcode »

mentalgear wrote: post #94

> VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction Why am I not surprised big Capital corrupts everything. Also, Goodhart's law applies again: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". HN Folks: What reliant, diverse signals do you use to quickly eval a repo's quality? For me it is: Maintenance status, age, elegance of API and maybe commit history. PS: From the article:…

I usually just read the dang code.
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