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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#211

Post by bigfishrunning »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #186
mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

Hiring a QB based off instagram followers isn't even that unrealistic. If you can put together a team to win the Superbowl, sure do it! If not, just get together a team that people enjoy following and watching. Much of that would be putting athletes on the field that people engage with.

I agree! Maybe the Browns have never played a Superbowl, but I would imagine they are still making a profit. Different goal.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#212

Post by AgentMatt »

MrSandingMan wrote: post #140
lukasgelbmann wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use stars to try and protect myself from dependency confusion attacks. For example, let’s say I want to run some piece of software that I’ve heard about, and let’s say I trust that the software isn’t malware because of its reputation. Most of the time, I’d be installing the software from somewhere that’s not GitHub. A lot of package managers will let anyone upload malware with a name that’s very similar to the soft…

What does "TFA" mean here please?

The featured article.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#213

Post by pdyc »

i was with them until

"We ran our own analysis sampling 150 profiles per repo across 20 projects and found repos where 36-76% of stargazers have zero followers and fork-to-star ratios 10x below organic baselines"

This does not looks like appropriate signal to use on github, i doubt that this is organic baseline.If this is used as metric than study might be flawed.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#214

Post by georgeecollins »

kibwen wrote: post #169
mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

[flagged]

true, but the way I would frame it is we are all morons in someone else's eyes. No one is as smart as they think they are. The mistake Americans make is thinking that rich people are so smart that everything they do is smart.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#215

Post by q3k »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #106

I don't think I have ever used stars in making a decision to use a library and I don't understand why anyone would. Here are the things I look at in order: * last commit date. Newer is better * age. old is best if still updating. New is not great but tolerable if commits aren't rapid * issues. Not the count, mind you, just looking at them. How are they handled, what kind of issues are lingering open. * some of the co…

I also never in my career have consciously looked at the GH star counter on a repo, let alone used it to make decisions.

Instead I look at (in addition to the above):

1. Who is the author? Is it just some person chasing Internet clout by making tons of 'cool' libraries across different domains? Or are they someone senior working in an industry sector from which project might actually benefit in expertise?

2. Is the author working alone? Are there regular contributors? Is there an established governance structure? Is the project going to survive one person getting bored / burning out / signing an NDA / dying?

3. Is the project style over substance? Did it introduce logos, discord channels, mascots too early? Is it trying too hard to become The New Hot Thing?

4. What are the project's dependencies? Is its dependency set conservative or is it going to cause supply chain problems down the line?

5. What's the project's development cadence? Is it shipping features and breaking APIs too fast? Has it ever done a patch release or backported fixes, or does it always live at the bleeding edge?

6. NEW ARRIVAL 2026! Is the project actually carefully crafted and well designed, or is it just LLM slop? Am I about to discover that even though it's a bunch of code it doesn't actually work?

7. If the project is security critical (handles auth, public facing protocol parsing, etc.): do a deeper dive into the code.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#217

Post by ertgbnm »

mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

Instagram follows is not a good way to hire football players but it's probably a good way to hire instagram influencers. The football analogy is a little unfair because VCs are investing in more than just a company's ability to "play football" they are investing in the brand, the marketing, and the vision. GitHub stars are at least an indication of a startup having a promising brand or some ability to market themselves.

Nevertheless, VCs are in fact pretty dumb sometimes and it'd be stupid to invest soley based on stars.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#219

Post by ramesh31 »

mauvehaus wrote: post #124

Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points ? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super…

>Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points?

Github stars used to really mean something. Having 1k+ was considered a stable, mature library being used in prod by thousands of people. At 10k+ you were a top level open source project. Now they've been gamed by the dead internet just like everything else, and it's depressing as hell.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#220

Post by palmotea »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #199
kibwen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The answer isn't that they're morons. It's that they aren't people who "invest" in "good businesses" to make money, but instead on the whole a class of individuals classed with gambling on high risk ventures that will have absolutely massive returns and they don't care if 90% of them fail and 9% flounder because the 1% that succeed bring in absolutely apeshit amounts of $$ when they are acquired by someone else. Usin…

> Again, VCs don't care if you'll make a profitable business some day. They're just interested in if someone else will come along and pay out giant bags of cash for it later in a liquidity event. If they get even one of those successes, all the stupid GH star watching pays off.

And if that's true, they should be slapped, hard. They're no longer performing a socially useful function, and and have degraded towards pure financialization. Some middleman between fools and their money.

As much as I don't like Altman, VC should be pumping money into startups like Helios--companies pursuing cutting-edge technology that could totally fail (yes, that's an organic em-dash).

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