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GitHub's fake star economy
391–400 of 403 posts
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#392Built a fake star detector that uses stratified sampling across
the full star history (not just recent stargazers).
Ran it on Union Labs and a few other repos from the Awesome Agents investigation. Results are interesting.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
VCs mostly invest other peoples' money, not their own. The "rich people" are often pension funds, endowments, and other pools of capital rather than individual morons. VCs themselves probably suffer from chronic overestimation of their own intelligence, but there just aren't many good signals at the stage of companies they're looking at. No customers, no revenue; often just an idea and hopefully a prototype. GitHub s…
> the bar for signal quality is just really low During the Covid-era when money was flowing more readily I worked with a series A startup founder on improving their unit economics. They were spending a lot on customer acquisition but after my analysis I realized that they were losing money on each customer. It didn't matter how long you ran the timeline, with churn they never broke even on new customers. When I recom…
Funny anecdote, but that's a bit of a different issue. Actual money moving around is a relatively strong signal. Those investors just aren't looking at the full picture.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#394hi
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
<10 Stars is a strong signal, that a repo is not relevant to anyone except maybe the maintainer. This fact does not change even if other repos have bough 10.000 stars.
why would it be a strong signal?
have you ever starred a project? I don't
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#396https://github.com/vlang/v
Way more suspicious star count looks to be from Zig[1]. That's based on their weird GitHub repo history[2].
In fact the initial negative campaigns initiated by the creators of Zig and Odin against V (and then turned on other languages like C3[4] and Zen C[5]), appeared to have been based on jealousy over supporter donations and GitHub stars.
Zig, has among the weirdest GitHub star history of any language repo seen. Stalled or lower GitHub popularity, then sudden explosion in stars after the release of numerous AI ebooks on Amazon (mid to late 2024). The release of the mostly AI ebooks, were very oddly close together, as if by contract or bounty. Just a strange timeline. Even when Zig moved to Codeberg and their GitHub repo was "frozen", was getting hundreds of stars per month (despite over 3,000 open issues) for a long time, which made no sense.
On the other hand, the vlang repo has always been rated in or near the top 10 of language repos[3] (per year), based on stars, since close to its beginning (from 2019).
Lastly, stars on GitHub are often checked and purged. It's not like Github personnel don't look. A major indicator of fake stars, is that the repo does not have matching activity, contributors, or forks. For instance, like V (when it came into existence), Zen C (4K stars since 2025) had a sudden burst in stars. Allowing it to nearly catch a long time repo like C3 (5K stars since 2019). Does V or Zen C, by gaining stars quickly or having more stars (than a 2019 competitor) mean they are fake?
It's the other indicators that are important too, not just star counts or fan jealousy over other repos having higher star counts.
[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig
[2]: https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language
[3]: https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language/trend...
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#397I 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…
> * last commit date. Newer is better To be honest, these days I have more faith in an application or library with a moderate development pace where maybe the last commit wasn't 2 seconds ago co-authored by claude (in the most blatant examples). The same is true for amount of commits, the type of commits, release cadence and the amount of fixes and hotfixes in releases. I don't feel like being a glorified alpha teste…
There is truth in that. A lot of claude co-authored repos look frantic and unstable. It will still depend on the contributors managing things properly to maintain stability and not succumb to AI addiction and insanity.
> community behind the software
Right. You can't just look at stars. You have to look to see that there is an actual community, along with other contributors.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#398Some projects I've encountered seem unremarkable, yet surprisingly, they have a lot of stars.
A possibility is that some people give stars based on the idea or potential. Something like, "this was a great idea or could be great one day". Then, unfortunately, many such repos slowly go nowhere or get (or just about become) abandoned.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#399https://github.com/vlang/v
Way more suspicious star count looks to be from Zig[1]. That's based on their weird GitHub repo history[2]. In fact the initial negative campaigns initiated by the creators of Zig and Odin against V (and then turned on other languages like C3[4] and Zen C[5]), appeared to have been based on jealousy over supporter donations and GitHub stars. Zig, has among the weirdest GitHub star history of any language repo seen. S…
your links don't back up your claims
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#400Yeah, I was pondering a few months away when I checked Pathway, an ETL solution. I've never heard about it but I saw some news that they have created a better model than transformer. So stats: - link: https://github.com/pathwaycom/pathway - watch: 115, fork: 1.6k, star: 63.5k - issues: 32, PR-s: 3 And compare to other ETL tool, like Apache Airflow - used by me and many machine learning folks: - link https://github.co…
A co-creator of Pathway here - noticed some inbound from the HN link and was a bit shocked to see the discussion. Of course, Airflow is one of the most widely used technologies out there, even if sometimes considered part of the "legacy" orchestration stack.
For software that is anything other than a modifiable template, stars and forks typically serve users as bookmarks. In the distant past, forks were the prevailing bookmark mechanism. Users who joined Github long after the star functionality was added generally prefer stars over forks for bookmarking. Personally, when evaluating current production use of a project, I index most strongly on the count and type of issues raised.
As for the Pathway framework specifically, if you dive in, the star-gazer demographics is split roughly evenly between: (A) folks, like parent, who heard about the tech one way or another and thought it was cool enough to engage with; and (B) participants of bootcamps and hackathons based on this framework and run in partnerships with top-tier universities globally. The license also restricts forking, and is less welcoming to external contributions than Apache projects.