GitHub's fake star economy
awesomeagents.ai
GitHub's fake star economy
1–10 of 403 posts
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#2Seen this firsthand, repos with hundreds of stars and zero meaningful commits or issues. In hardware/RTL projects it's less prominent.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#3Honest 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who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated.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 without simple version bumps.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#4I don't know what is more, for lack of a better word, pathetic, buying stars/upvotes/platform equivalent or thinking of oneself as a serious investor and using something like that as a metric guiding your decision making process.
I'd give a lot of credit to Microsoft and the Github team if they went on a major ban/star removal wave of affected repos, akin to how Valve occasionally does a major sweep across CSGO2 banning verified cheaters.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#5I do not look at the stars. I look at the list of contributors, their activities and the bug reports / issues.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#6Honest 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who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated.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…
Stars are a simple metric even someone like a VC investor can understand. Your "better system" sounds far too complicated and time consuming.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#7Honest 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who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated.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…
I wonder if there's a more graph oriented score that could work well here - something pagerank ish so that a repo scores better if it has issues reported by users who themselves have a good score. So it's at least a little resilient to crude manipulation attempts
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#8I do not look at the stars. I look at the list of contributors, their activities and the bug reports / issues.
> I look at the list of contributors
Specifically if those avatars are cute animie girls.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#9Honest 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…
The stars have fallen to the classic problem of becoming a goal and stopping being a good metric. This can apply to your measure just as well: issues can also be gamed to be opened, closed and responded to quickly, especially now with LLMs.
Re: GitHub's fake star economy
#10Honest 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…
because VC don't care about anything being legitimate, if it can fool VCs it can also fool market participants, then VC can profit off of it.
one VC told me, you'll get more funding and upvotes if u don't put "india" in your username.