Sounds like a valid guerrilla marketing technique to me. This is certainly a grey area but nothing indicates malicious intent. Even introducing new members to the github community of sharing software knowledge is a valuable initiative.
Stop abusing GitHub stars
41–44 of 44 posts
Re: Stop abusing GitHub stars
#42>You are ruining all the efforts that communities have made github stars a valuable indicator.
Nope, stars are a stupid popularity contest that shouldn't have been a feature of Github in the first place. Leave that sort of stuff to Instagram "influencers" or whatever.
Re: Stop abusing GitHub stars
#43>You are ruining all the efforts that communities have made github stars a valuable indicator. Nope, stars are a stupid popularity contest that shouldn't have been a feature of Github in the first place. Leave that sort of stuff to Instagram "influencers" or whatever.
While I do believe how many stars a repo has doesn’t represent the worthiness or sth, still IMO, exploiting nondev people by bribing them to give a star for the repo is quite an “uncool” thing to do.
Re: Stop abusing GitHub stars
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Follow on twitter, and RT to enter our Giveaway That's for promoting your brand. > Signup and Star and get coupons That's against the open-source ecosystem spirit, where the number of stars is a measurement of project popularity.
The number of stars means absolutely nothing. I don't understand why people care so much about an insignificant counter in a proprietary platform.
Github stars do signify the overall quality and public reception of a project, at least to me. Github doesn't have "sharing"-type social networking functionality to artificially increase the number of stars, so I think it's in a pretty natural place right now and I hope it stays that way.