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who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated.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…
They don't.
I've helped with due diligence on a couple projects. VCs know that metrics can be gamed because they see it all the time. Stars, followers, views, clicks, likes. A portion of entrepreneurs have been gaming every metric since before you and I learned how to program. It has always been this way and always will.
Most of the VC-related comments have interpreted this article to mean that VCs are so dumb that they haven't realized that stars can be faked, but in reality VCs spend so much time sorting through fake metrics that they understand this probably better than most here.
If you've ever gone through due diligence for an acquisition or big investment round it's amazing how much work you have to do in order to prove that your metrics are real. When things got crazy after COVID there was a short time when VCs were trying to move so fast that they skipped this, but it resulted in some high profile fraud cases.
During normal times, you will get grilled on metrics. They might see stars as a signal for rising stars, but they're not throwing money at projects based on star count like many commenters assume. They will do a deeper dive before investing and they will call it off if things aren't adding up. The amount of diligence scales with the investment, so someone getting a $10K check can get away with a lot of fraud but that $2mm funding round isn't going to cross the finish line based on star count.