GitHub's fake star economy

Post by nitwit005 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #68

ernst_klim wrote: post #63

I 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…

Post by antonvs » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

palmotea wrote: post #220

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by arealaccount » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

LargeWu wrote: post #239

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.

They say Silicon Valley was more of a documentary than a comedy, and now we have one more way life imitates art: A growing army of Erlich Bachmann's.

Post by matheusmoreira » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

Post by rbonvall » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #171

xnorswap wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I forgot you guys have "The Draft", so failing is an advantage, doubly so if you can sell your draft picks, because then you can keep losing by having sold away the mechanism for getting you competitive again. I am so glad the proposed "European super league" was killed off so hard, so that we don't get a franchise model, it produces so many adverse incentives.

The thing I like about EU football is that if your team sucks arse through a garden hose too long, your entire team gets demoted to a lower league. That would put a fire under some asses!