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GitHub's fake star economy

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Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#371

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

p2detar wrote: post #205
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…

Totally agree with you. I think Github "stars" are a relic of the past. They should be renamed to "Bookmarks" and exist as a tool for users to just mark interesting repositories. By no means should a repository keep a count of how many people bookmarked it. It makes no practical sense. Active maintainers and commit dates are much better metric.

As someone else pointed out... When commits are this cheap, if that's the metric to be gamed, it will be gamed.

You just create 5 GitHub accounts, and spread your Claude Code commits to 5 separate accounts to make it look like there's 5 active contributors.

If anything, we're better off with a fake star economy that is the main thing most people are trying to game, so the signal to noise can still be that it (at least so far) seems pretty easy to tell how many REAL active contributors there are.

Though, I should note, 2 heads are not always better than 1.

I'm more interested in a repository that has commits only from two geniuses than a repository that has 100s of morons contributing to it.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#375

Post by luke5441 »

wazHFsRy wrote: post #286
luke5441 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors. My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.

How will fake stars help it getting of the ground?

My point is that not having fake stars may prevent you from gaining traction.

Organic users still have to consider it, but then they might not dismiss it outright because it has five stars or something.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#376

Post by bsuvc »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #352
whatisthiseven wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

you're arguing with people who are fundamentally unempathetic. it's a lot of words spent on vamping about stars instead of contributing to stuff everyone actually uses, which hardly anyone does, which should tell you everything you need to know about the value of having open source users: most of them only care that something is free as in beer.

Are you suggesting that because I consider stars, I must be a freeloader?

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#377

Post by kindkang2024 »

utopiah wrote: post #276
kindkang2024 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice to know the name for this — Goodhart's Law. And I think the core reason is that the cost to fake these metrics is far less than what they claim to represent. Stars, reviews, ratings, trading volumes — all cheap to manufacture, and only getting cheaper with AI. I've been thinking about this a lot. These metrics are all just marketing signals to draw people's attention, trying to make some kind of deals. So the fi…

> make the cost of the signal match what it claims to represent. Well that's the WHOLE problem of trust. There is so much work on blockchain in proof of work, proof of stake, etc in order to protect ourselves from attacks, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack If you do find a way it would apply to a lot more than "just" GitHub star for VCs.

> Well that's the WHOLE problem of trust.

Great point. It all comes down to trust.

Some are masters at setting attention traps. They manipulate all these cheap metrics that normal people naturally pay attention to, confusing potential deal parties, serving self-interest while increasing risk and causing harm to the other side.

> It would apply to a lot more than "just" GitHub star for VCs

Yes. It would apply to a lot more than "just" GitHub stars for VCs — even more so if the 'interactions' are naturally deal-based.

Imagine a metric for proof of work named DUKI-ALM. If you give away $100 to the world, you gain 100 DUKI-ALM — absolutely equal to the cost.

Think of it as tips contributed jointly by the taker and maker of a deal, paid out to the world. The DUKI-ALM signal is the sum of all tips. They tipped $10? The metric value is 10.

Products that have the ability to make more deals and generate more surplus will naturally contribute more — and gain more signal of trust. Sybil attacks are prevented by design, since what's the point of attacking if you still need to tip the world 100 USDT to gain 100?

I'd love to hear if you see a hole in this — the cost of the signal matches exactly what it claims to represent.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#378

Post by deltaplan »

oreally wrote: post #253
whatisthiseven wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

[dead]

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#379

Post by palmotea »

nradov wrote: post #289
palmotea wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You should start your own VC firm, solicit cash from LPs, and invest in companies like Helios. Go ahead, no one will stop you.

> You should start your own VC firm, solicit cash from LPs, and invest in companies like Helios. Go ahead, no one will stop you.

Why would I want to do that? I think they should be disciplined until the perform a more socially useful function. Competing with them is an entirely different thing that's unlikely to accomplish that goal.

Re: GitHub's fake star economy

#380

Post by palmotea »

antonvs wrote: post #313
palmotea wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Helios? Altman? I think you mean Helion, the fusion company, not Helios (quantum computers). Either way, that’s a pretty hilarious example to use when you’re criticizing VC foolishness. Anyone doing due diligence wouldn’t go near those companies. Spoiler alert: commercial fusion power may not be practical at all, but if it is, the timescales to delivery are measured in numbers closer to centuries than decades. Don’t…

> Helios? Altman? I think you mean Helion, the fusion company, not Helios (quantum computers). Either way, that’s a pretty hilarious example to use when you’re criticizing VC foolishness. Anyone doing due diligence wouldn’t go near those companies.

I actually don't care that much about the specifics, just the general direction: pumping money into developing technology that doesn't exist, instead of looking to flip yet another software startup where GitHub stars would matter.

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