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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#301

Post by boondongle »

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…

Almost all industries have divested themselves from the thing thing they supposedly had expertise in towards exploiting crowdsourced alternatives and then pocketing the extra money.

Record labels did this with soundcloud or only picking up people who already had a following. Movies have done this repeatedly with adaptation (due respect to people who like their books remade faithfully, there's a reason the 70's/80's were that decade and it basically stopped once Comics/LotR arrived). A24 represents a disruption, not a normal studio. Books did this with webnovels or paying dirt cheap and making the Author market.

What people tend to forget is they're just resource gatekeepers. They could just choose to invest in offices with cats because an office with cats popped massively one time and you can't say they're wrong, because there's no alternative funding you can get to A/B test with. In theory there are different firms - but they often went to the same schools, same peer group, same fraternity/sororities, and once they're in the wild they all know each other. It's not a different behavior if it's VC or if it's Nashville.

The real question is how long before either governmental-busting or someone notices the lack of care with money and shops alternatives. In theory this is also partially why American firms face international risk - lacking people respecting their laziness, someone can break their model.

That said - I'm not saying they're not smart - just that often there's a tendency to delude that shortcuts taken represent a "good job" rather than "no one can really say we're doing it poorly".

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#302

Post by a1o »

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.

Depending on which city you live, my feeling is owning a car is a lot less optional once you have kids, at least in their earlier years.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#304

Post by nradov »

rvba wrote: post #290
nradov wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise. By most criteria James Mattis would be considered a smart guy: he earned a Master's degree, commanded troops effectively in combat, and served as Secretary of Defense. And yet he fell for the Theranos fraud. You have to know your limitations, and too many people think that because they're good at one thing they must be geniuses who are good at everythin…

What does a soldier / pollitical appointment know about finance?

Exactly. That's the point.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#305

Post by abustamam »

matt_kantor wrote: post #193
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…

> If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars. Will you continue to do this after reading TFA?

I will. I have other heuristics too, like there are plenty of starred libraries that are just hard to use or don't actually fit my use case. But if I choose the 1000 star one and it works easily, then cool. If it doesn't, I'll try the 15 star one. If it works, cool. If not, then I'll probably end up vibe coding my own thing.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#306

Post by calebkaiser »

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…

I've worked on two open source infrastructure projects that raised money now, and am friends with people involved in many more. I'd put a couple of asterisks next to the claims in this article:

- VCs definitely cared about our Stars, especially in early stages, but not as our primary metric. I suppose Stars might be the primary metric if they're truly off the charts, but usually they're just one of many social proof signals an investor might look at.

- Investors, especially at the earliest stages, are quite a varied bunch. Some were diligent about looking at who was leaving Stars on the repo (i.e. are these accounts fake/do they belong to potential future customers). Some less so. This is true for basically every metric (see: startups that grossly misreport ARR)

- Fake GitHub stars were a thing way before 2022. I'd have to look in more detail at the methodology here, but I'd question any analysis that finds that paying for GitHub Stars (or any social following kind of metric) is a strictly post-2022 thing. Any metric that can be construed as social proof will immediately have its own grifter economy. Investors know this and (mostly) do their diligence.

Finally, showing numbers is hard for an early stage open source startup. At later stages, you should be able to show an actual business with typical metrics, but at the seed stage you often just have a repo and a website. Your goal is just to get a lot of people using your software. You can add telemetry to track that, but that's a thorny decision. GitHub Stars aren't a terrible proxy for popularity, provided that you audit the quality of the following. A project with a lot of organic stars and forks is, at the very least, a project that a lot of people are familiar with.

I'm not saying that GitHub Stars aren't wildly overvalued or gamed, but contextualized properly, they're a reasonable metric to consider, particularly at earlier stages. Most investors aren't just throwing millions at random repositories with 20k Stars from obviously spam accounts.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#307

Post by aanet »

If you think a github star is an accolade of some sorts, let me show you...

...the "Likes" on a post - on FB, twttr, LI, HN, ...

...the "Hearts" on post

...the "bookmarks" on a post

...the "upvotes"

...its corollary, the "downvotes"

...the fake dollars in your fake game

...the fake lives in your fav fantasy game

...ad inf

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#308

Post by jt2190 »

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…

>

Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#309

Post by jt2190 »

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…

> … VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points?

The only claim here is that there’s a report that tracks GitHub star growth that is that is presumably read by VCs:

>> Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial.

Again, the claim here is that the report is “influential”. Maybe?

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