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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#251

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

The_Blade wrote: post #157
xnorswap wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow American Football so I don't know how coaching contracts work for you guys, but how does someone go 1W 15L one season, survive as head coach to go 0W 16L the next season, and still start the next season after that as head coach? Over here the fans would be singing "You're getting sacked in the morning" halfway through that first season. I guess not having relegation makes things slightly less ruthless…

Browns fan in. We're owned by a criminal (truck stop-related fraud) who was convinced by a homeless person to draft Johnny Manziel. trust me, we want to put him (and Paul Dolan) into graveyard orbit. but it's not like Vercel where you can just go use AWS or Cloudflare or whatever; and it's not like switching makes you weak, you stand by your team through the hard times! plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watc…

> plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watching football? hahahahahaha

Former Seahawks fan here, it's easier than you think. (It wasn't their record, I stuck with them through the 90s after all, it was realizing what CTE meant for the players).

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#252

Post by zby »

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…

How do you check if a github repo is 'good'?

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#253

Post by oreally »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #180
bsuvc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I do it all the time, whenever there are competing libraries to choose among. It's a heuristic that saves me time. If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars. I also look at download count and release frequency. Basically I don't want to use some obscur…

> It's a heuristic that saves me time. A bad one. I listed many other useful heuristics. Do you not find value in them? Do you find stars more valuable than them? Take a moment to consider stars as a useful metric may only be useful for packages created prior to ~2015 when they weren't such a strong vanity metric, and are already very well established. This is preconditioning you to think "stars can still sometimes b…

This behavior is similar from the time I played a very popular mmorpg - when people selected others for their groups, their criteria deferred to the candidate's analyzed gameplay records (their 'logs') on a website which boiled down to a number showing their damage dealt and the color of it's text.

There was nothing about going into the logs to see if they could do the game's mechanical challenges, minimizing their damage taken. It made for a worse environment yet the players couldn't stop themselves from using such criteria.

In short, humans are lazy and default to numbers and colors when given the chance. When others question them on it, they can have a default easy answer of being part of the herd of zebras to get out of trouble.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#254

Post by kibwen »

georgeecollins wrote: post #214
kibwen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Yes, but while we're all born stupid, rich people are subject to forces that actually make them dumber than the average person. Normally people learn from failure because they experience tangible negative consequences as a result of failure. But money is a better insulator than a vacuum, and once you're sufficiently wealthy, failure no longer has any tangible negative effect on your quality of life. Lose ten billion dollars? Lose 90% of your net worth? You and your kin will still be living lives of ease and luxury for generations to come. They're destined to be morons because there's no pressure forcing them to learn from their mistakes.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#255

Post by copperroof »

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…

Vcs are some of the dumbest people I have ever interacted with. Full stop no exceptions. They are luck, confirmation bias and survivor bias weaponized.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#256

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

I remember long ago watching Tom Scott (iirc) video about him buying facebook impressions once

you instantly got like 40k likes - but there was a catch

algorithm saw you getting a lot of likes from Iran/Pakistan, so went on recommending the post to those countries, got no response and stopped recommending said post altogether

in a sense, it became a self-regulating system, where fake impressions extinguish their very reason to be bought

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#257

Post by ziml77 »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #176
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…

Sure, I suppose that is one solution, but given that buying stars has been around for at least 5 years, and I have been aware of people faking stars for longer than that, I am not sure why you would rely on stars as a primary metric. There are many other far more useful metrics to look at first , and to focus on first , and to think about. Every time you think about stars, you'll forget the other stuff, or discount i…

Interesting that 5 years ago is exactly when this page showed up according to the Wayback Machine: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/exploring-projects-on...

In it they explicitly call it out as a ranking metric

> Many of GitHub's repository rankings depend on the number of stars a repository has. In addition, Explore GitHub shows popular repositories based on the number of stars they have.

Yet another case of metric -> target -> useless metric

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#258

Post by rib3ye »

adamkf wrote: post #249
rib3ye wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is compounded by young, newly rich tech workers (no kids, no mortgage, maybe not even a car) experimenting with being a VC because they've recently reached accredited investor status. and it's not just ZIRP. every recent IPO or liquidity event creates literally 500 more of these guys.

> maybe not even a car Hold up — one can be mature without any of those things, but cars are especially optional.

maturity has nothing to do with it. these are recurring expense liabilities with very very distant return horizon.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#260

Post by pbjerkeseth »

This has unfortunately been going on for years at this point, for as long as there has been an OSS-to-profitability pipeline gamed for startups I'd guess. I wouldn't be surprised if it has progressed to fake contributors/discussions/issues/forks as well. Seems like an inevitable outcome for any platform with social signals.
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