GitHub's fake star economy
- whatisthiseven - 163366 sekunder sedanI 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 code. No one is evaluating all of the code of libraries they use. You can certainly check some!
What does stars tell me? They are an indirect variable caused by the above things (driving real engagement and third interest) or otherwise fraud. Only way to tell is to look at the things I listed anyway.
I always treated stars like a bookmark "I'll come back to this project" and never thought of it as a quality metric. Years ago when this problem first surfaced I was surprised (but should not have been in retrospect) they had become a substitute for quality.
I hope the FTC comes down hard on this.
Edit:
* commit history: just browse the history to see what's there. What kind of changes are made and at what cadence.
- gobdovan - 164933 sekunder sedanThese kinds of articles make you feel like there are specific, actionable problems that just need an adjustment and then they disappear. However, the system is much worse than you'd expect. Studies like this are extremely valuable, but they don't address the systematic problems affecting all signaling channels: most signals themselves have been manufactured into a product.
Build a SaaS and you'll have "journalists" asking if they can include you in their new "Top [your category] Apps in [current year]", you just have to pay $5k for first place, $3k for second, and so on (with a promotional discount for first place, since it's your first interaction).
You'll get "promoters" offering to grow your social media following, which is one reason companies may not even realize that some of their own top accounts and GitHub stars are mostly bots.
You'll get "talent scouts" claiming they can find you experts exactly in your niche, but in practice they just scrape and spam profiles with matching keywords on platforms like LinkedIn once you show interest, while simultaneously telling candidates that they work with companies that want them.
And in hiring, you'll see candidates sitting in interview farms quite clearly in East Asia, connecting through Washington D.C. IPs, present themselves with generic European names, with synthetic camera backgrounds, who somehow ace every question, and list experience with every technology you mention in the job post in their CVs already (not hyperbole, I've seen exactly this happen).
If a metric or signal matters, there is already an ecosystem built to fake it, and faking it starts to be operational and just another part of doing business.
- donatj - 165979 sekunder sedanI run a tiny site that basically gave a point-at-able definition to an existing adhoc standard. As part of the effort I have a list of software and libraries following the standard on the homepage. Initially I would accept just about anything but as the list grew I started wanting to set a sort of notability baseline.
Specifically someone submitted a library that was only several days old, clearly entirely AI generated, and not particularly well built.
I noted my concerns with listing said library in my reply declining to do so, among them that it had "zero stars". The author was very aggressive and in his rant of a reply asked how many stars he needed. I declined to answer, that's not how this works. Stars are a consideration, not the be all end all.
You need real world users and more importantly real notability. Not stars. The stars are irrelevant.
This conversation happened on GitHub and since then I have had other developers wander into that conversation and demand I set a star count definition for my "vague notability requirement". I'm not going to, it's intentionally vague. When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric as they say.
I don't want the page to get overly long, and if I just listed everything with X star count I'd certainly list some sort of malware.
I am under no obligation to list your library. Stop being rude.
- mauvehaus - 161528 sekunder sedanCan anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that[0], but it's not a way to mount a serious Super Bowl campaign[1].
Are VC's just that lazy about making investment decisions? Is this yet another side-effect of ZIRP[2] and too much money chasing a return? Is nobody looking too hard in the hope of catching the next rocket to the moon?
From the outside, investing based on GitHub stars seems insane. Like, this can't be a serious way of investing money. If you told me you were going to invest my money based on GitHub stars, I'd laugh, and then we'd have an awkward silence while I realize there isn't a punchline coming.
[0] I'm from Cleveland. I get to pick on them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cleveland_Browns_seaso... I think their record speaks for itself.
- ernst_klim - 167220 sekunder sedanI think people expect the star system to be a cheap proxy for "this is a reliable piece of sorfware which has a good quality and a lot of eyes".
I think as a proxy it fails completely: astroturfing aside stars don't guarantee popularity (and I bet the correlation is very weak, a lot of very fundamental system libraries have small number of stars). Stars also don't guarantee the quality.
And given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy. I'm teaching myself to skip the stars and skim through the code and evaluate the quality of both architecture and implementation. And I found that quite a few times I prefer a less-"starry" alternative after looking directly at the repo content.
- dafi70 - 171608 sekunder sedanHonest 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.
- panabee - 153998 sekunder sedanVCs are soccer stars, but founders play basketball.
It’s easy to dunk on VCs, but the herd effect is rational after considering the typical VC’s background, the intense competition for good deals, and the job requirements — to prudently deploy capital.
Who wants to pitch their boss on investing $1-10M in a product no one uses, built by a team of anons?
This is not to defend the process, but merely explain it. It’s not so different from customer marketing. To win a VC, first understand the VC.
Once hired, VCs cannot easily get fired yet they exert immense strategic control.
Nonetheless, many founders interview summer interns harder than VCs.
Heuristic: after removing capital, would you hire the VC to be your boss?
Great VCs are worth the equity and will turbocharge startups. When you find one, don't haggle. Get a fair deal, and get right back to coding.
Bad VCs will destroy companies the same way soccer stars would destroy basketball teams if made the head coach.
- art_mach - 157168 sekunder sedanYeah, 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.com/apache/airflow
- watch: 777, forks 16.9k!!!!!, Stars: (only!) 45.1k
- issues: 1200 (!!!), PR-s (501!!!).
- lkm0 - 170609 sekunder sedanWe're this close to rediscovering pagerank
- mentalgear - 164083 sekunder sedan> VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction
Why am I not surprised big Capital corrupts everything. Also, Goodhart's law applies again: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
HN Folks: What reliant, diverse signals do you use to quickly eval a repo's quality? For me it is: Maintenance status, age, elegance of API and maybe commit history.
PS: From the article:
> instead tracks unique monthly contributor activity - anyone who created an issue, comment, PR, or commit. Fewer than 5% of top 10,000 projects ever exceeded 250 monthly contributors; only 2% sustained it across six months.
> [...] recommends five metrics that correlate with real adoption: package downloads, issue quality (production edge cases from real users), contributor retention (time to second PR), community discussion depth, and usage telemetry.
- gslin - 166260 sekunder sedan* https://dagster.io/blog/fake-stars (2023) - Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market with Dagster, dbt and BigQuery
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13459 (2024/2025) - Six Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Spams, and Malware
- frabonacci - 119850 sekunder sedanwhat's even more alarming is how exploitable GitHub Trending itself is these days. you can get the star count to fork ratio right and you land on the front page, which then pulls in real organic stars
- aledevv - 169471 sekunder sedan> VCs explicitly use stars as sourcing signals
In my opinion, nothing could be more wrong. GitHub's own ratings are easily manipulated and measure not necessarily the quality of the project itself, but rather its Popularity. The problem is that popularity is rarely directly proportional to the quality of the project itself.
I'm building a product and I'm seeing what important is the distribution and comunication instead of the development it self.
Unfortunately, a project's popularity is often directly proportional to the communication "built" around it and inversely proportional to its actual quality. This isn't always the case, but it often is.
Moreover, adopting effective and objective project evaluation tools is quite expensive for VCs.
- NooneAtAll3 - 151364 sekunder sedanI remember long ago watching Tom Scott (iirc) video about him buying facebook impressions once
you instantly got like 40k likes - but there was a catch
algorithm saw you getting a lot of likes from Iran/Pakistan, so went on recommending the post to those countries, got no response and stopped recommending said post altogether
in a sense, it became a self-regulating system, where fake impressions extinguish their very reason to be bought
- mlpotato - 162331 sekunder sedanI wonder if it makes sense for GitHub to use graph-theoretic measures like PageRank instead of raw stars. In simple terms, a repo is considered important if it is starred or forked by GitHub users who maintain other important repos.
It’s more expensive to compute, but the resulting scores would be more trustworthy unless I’m missing something.
- tsylba - 164628 sekunder sedanPersonally I use stars in two ways: 1) It's interesting and I want to keep track of it for possible future use and 2) It's a fantastic idea and kudos to you even if I'll never use it.
As a side note it's kind of disheartening that everytime there is a metric related to popularity there would be some among us that will try to game it for profit, basically to manipulate our natural bias.
As a side note it's always a bit sad how the parasocial nature of the modern web make us like machine interfacing via simple widgets, becoming mechanical robot ourselves rationalising IO via simple metrics kind of forgetting that the map is never the territory.
- apples_oranges - 170646 sekunder sedanI look at the starts when choosing dependencies, it's a first filter for sure. Good reminder that everything gets gamed given the incentives.
- ghstinda - 121327 sekunder sedanhacker news should get rid of the upvotes, i thought that was the lamest part of the site that and the openai smooching
- halamadrid - 136138 sekunder sedanBuying stars explicitly is one mechanism. Another one is running Hackathons in India or lower cost countries with a prize, which is qualified by "Starring" said repo.
Easily 1-3k stars per hackathon from student or hackathon participants for a cost of $1-5k. And some free marketing comes with too since participants may post on LinkedIn or other social media if they win something.
- Lapel2742 - 171366 sekunder sedanI do not look at the stars. I look at the list of contributors, their activities and the bug reports / issues.
- elashri - 169754 sekunder sedanI usually use stars as a bookmark list to visit later (which I rarely do). I probably would need to stop doing that and use my self-hosted "Karkeep" instance for github projects as well.
- fr3on - 132497 sekunder sedanStars measure attention. Packagist downloads measure automation. Neither measures trust. The only signal that's hard to fake is: does something real depend on this?
- pascal-maker - 155426 sekunder sedanVery simply, you need to see VCs as branding companies who give people with many followers brand deals. VCs think that if you have a lot of stars, you must have hit product-market fit — or something close — because many developers have started using your open-source tool. This isn’t necessarily always the case. Every weekend project from Andrej Karpathy gets loads of stars because he is the most famous person on GitHub. What I’ve noticed a lot is that the repos with the most stars most of the time already came from big companies open-sourcing their tools, or people building free versions of paid software.
- Olshansky - 141923 sekunder sedanLiterally posted about this but w.r.t to agent-skills yesterday: https://olshansky.substack.com/p/why-every-developer-needs-t...
Need to move from skill downloads to skill usage.
- neehao - 125343 sekunder sedansee this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07919
- socketcluster - 168531 sekunder sedanMy project https://github.com/socketCluster/socketcluster has been accumulating stars slowly but steadily over about 13 years. Now it has over 6k stars but it doesn't seem to mean much nowadays as a metric. It sucks having put in the effort and seeing it get lost in a sea of scams and seeing people doubting my project's own authenticity.
It does feel like everything is a scam nowadays though. All the numbers seem fake; whether it's number of users, number of likes, number of stars, amount of money, number of re-tweets, number of shares issued, market cap... Maybe it's time we focus on qualitative metrics instead?
- mercurialsolo - 161972 sekunder sedan15 mins into this - Built this to identify the fraudsters https://github.com/mercurialsolo/realstars
We should do a hall of shame!
- - 148090 sekunder sedan
- tonmoy - 159211 sekunder sedanSteam wishlist, itch.io number of views, YouTube views and now GitHub stars… I’m tired of all the gamification of creativity. Now if you’d upvote my comment I can get same karma please and thank you
- pbjerkeseth - 150619 sekunder sedanThis has unfortunately been going on for years at this point, for as long as there has been an OSS-to-profitability pipeline gamed for startups I'd guess. I wouldn't be surprised if it has progressed to fake contributors/discussions/issues/forks as well. Seems like an inevitable outcome for any platform with social signals.
- simultsop - 142335 sekunder sedanWe need our spokesperson to speak about this!
- Topfi - 171405 sekunder sedanI 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.
- winddude - 150495 sekunder sedan"median star count at seed is 2,850" lower than I would have expected, but than again, I've maybe only had 20+ stars on my repos
- I think the zero follower account might be the weakest signal of a low quality account, I think I had zero followers for maybe 5+ years.
- cuttothechase - 139088 sekunder sedanAs one commenter put it: "You can fake a star count, but you can't fake a bug fix .. "
The way to beautify the pig is to put lipstick on the pig!
- ricardo81 - 163600 sekunder sedanSame old story of centralised algorithms being abused.
Github stars is akin to 'link popularity' or 'pagerank' which is ripe for abuse.
One way around it is to trust well known authors/users more. But it's hard to verify who is who. And accounts get bought/closed/hacked.
Another way is to hand over the algo in a way where individuals and groups can shape it, so there's no universal answer to everyone.
- hnmullany - 163732 sekunder sedanI came across one of these in 2018 with a "hot" open source company raising a Series B. An impressive star ramp (about 300% YoY growth) before the (high-priced/competitive) raise and three months later Github had revoked almost all the star growth from the previous year, resulting in a 20% YoY record. The company eventually got acquihired.
- tiffanyh - 159107 sekunder sedanFor all the hate on star systems, whether it’s GitHub/Amazon/AppStore, I’d still take having one over having nothing at all.
They make it easier to sort through options, help with search and discovery, and at least give you a baseline signal for trust can get better over time.
So to me, some signal better than no signal at all.
- anant-singhal - 169938 sekunder sedanSeen this happen first-hand with mid-to-large open source projects that sometimes "sponsor" hackathons, literally setting a task to "star the repo" to be eligible.
It’s supposed to get people to actually try your product. If they like it, they star it. Simple.
At that point, forcing the action just inflates numbers and strips them of any meaning.
Gaming stars to set it as a positive signal for the product to showcase is just SHIT.
- talsania - 172047 sekunder sedanSeen this firsthand, repos with hundreds of stars and zero meaningful commits or issues. In hardware/RTL projects it's less prominent.
- sixthDot - 141891 sekunder sedan
- marsulta - 144854 sekunder sedanAnyone else getting traffic numbers that are weird? I will see something like 300 clones yesterday, but i don't think that is real at all.
- abelanger - 146762 sekunder sedan> Our analysis revealed the fork-to-star ratio as the strongest simple heuristic for identifying potential manipulation. The logic is straightforward: a star costs nothing and conveys no commitment. A fork means someone downloaded the code to use or modify it.
This is just clearly...incorrect? You can both modify code without forking it and most software is distributed via a registry or binary download, which also wouldn't be represented in forks. For most projects, the number of forks is a lossy signal for how busy the contributor ecosystem is, nothing else.
- Cider9986 - 154445 sekunder sedanI hope this doesn't mean they will make it harder to create GitHub accounts. Have you ever tried to create a facebook account recently? Every time I've tried they demanded a facescan.
- spocchio - 168950 sekunder sedanI think the reason is that investors are not IT experts and don't know better metrics to evaluate.
I guess it's like fake followers on other social media platforms.
To me, it just reflects a behaviour that is typical of humans: in many situations, we make decisions in fields we don't understand, so we evaluate things poorly.
- Silamoth - 153810 sekunder sedanGenuine question: Who uses stars on GitHub? Even if I use a library or tool, it’s never once occurred to me to give it a star on GitHub. Is this a real thing people do? And if so, why?
- ffoster007 - 142071 sekunder sedanSome projects I've encountered seem unremarkable, yet surprisingly, they have a lot of stars.
- sigurfan - 142010 sekunder sedanIBM bought DataStax primarily based on Langflows fake stars. DataStax CEO shenanigans...
- mvvl - 159831 sekunder sedanTbh, for me there’s basically no difference between a repo with 2k stars and one with 20k.
Stars only matter when there are very few, like if it has almost none, that’s a red flag. Otherwise it’s just noise.
- nottorp - 169434 sekunder sedanWhy is zero public repos a criteria?
I paid github for years to keep my repos private...
But then I don't participate in the stars "economy" anyway, I don't star and I don't count stars, so I'm probably irrellevant for this study.
- 9cb14c1ec0 - 161612 sekunder sedanGithub could easily crack down on this. Spend $10 at each star provider, then ban all accounts involved. A tiny bit of money could create a huge drag on the ecosystem.
- izucken - 138140 sekunder sedanI should stop starring as a joke or as a bookmark...
- shivasurya - 154812 sekunder sedanStar might be the weakest signal of project usefulness and also trust is eroding I no longer trust stars for security.
- AKSF_Ackermann - 170503 sekunder sedanSo, if star to fork ratio is the new signal, time to make an extra fake star tier, where the bot forks the repo, generates a commit with the cheapest LLM available and pushes that to gh, right?
- odyssey7 - 152817 sekunder sedanThe fact that this article resonates, should I infer that the startup economy is picking back up?
- random__duck - 148008 sekunder sedanSo this is what real investigative journalism in the tech sector looks like ?
- swordsith - 135298 sekunder sedanVery obviously AI written, could tell by the end of the first sentence. Could've been a interesting read.. if you wrote it.
- lacunary - 154917 sekunder sedanFlair Driven Development. What do you think about a project that only has 15 pieces of flair?
- Oras - 169404 sekunder sedanWould be nice to see the ratio of OpenClaw stars
- mercurialsolo - 163564 sekunder sedanStars are like for developers? and you have a bunch of creators now entering the arena. what did you expect?
- LtWorf - 127301 sekunder sedanI briefly mentioned it in a talk at minidebconf a couple years ago.
Download counters are abused similarly and are even easier to inflate.
Understanding the real popularity of a project is now even harder with all the AI bots spamming about it.
- shantnutiwari - 155752 sekunder sedanSocial media platforms (like Instagram) have always had this problem of "buying" followers. There was an article some time ago where hollywood types would only give roles to people with high followers so people started buying followers.
Now that money is flowing to Github stars, no wonder people are buying fake "stars"? Seems capitalism is working as expected...
- mercurialsolo - 163314 sekunder sedanCost of signalling is way lesser than the cost of verification.
- ImJasonH - 161952 sekunder sedanWhy would OpenAI have bought stars for openai-fm I wonder?
- ludjer - 155471 sekunder sedanWait I can sell my github account for 5k ? Wow
- - 155768 sekunder sedan
- umrashrf - 165768 sekunder sedanThe stick of God doesn't make sound. God's work indeed
- feverzsj - 159396 sekunder sedanMaybe there is also fake upvote economy here.
- jiveturkey - 132884 sekunder sedan6 million. is that a lot? it's too bad they don't tell us.
but i think based on their statement that north of 90% of the buying repos were terminated by github, i'd say there would be very very many more fake stars without any github intervention.
i guess i just wish they hadn't made the first words of the article "Six million fake stars" without putting that into scale.
- pdyc - 155045 sekunder sedani was with them until
"We ran our own analysis sampling 150 profiles per repo across 20 projects and found repos where 36-76% of stargazers have zero followers and fork-to-star ratios 10x below organic baselines"
This does not looks like appropriate signal to use on github, i doubt that this is organic baseline.If this is used as metric than study might be flawed.
- aanet - 140301 sekunder sedanIf you think a github star is an accolade of some sorts, let me show you...
...the "Likes" on a post - on FB, twttr, LI, HN, ...
...the "Hearts" on post
...the "bookmarks" on a post
...the "upvotes"
...its corollary, the "downvotes"
...the fake dollars in your fake game
...the fake lives in your fav fantasy game
...ad inf
- ildari - 162758 sekunder sedanBots are killing opensource, but they pump product metrics so nobody cares. I maintain an open source repo and we've made a decision to limit all bot activity, even if it makes us less sexy in front of VCs.
We figured out a workaround to limit activity to prior contributors only, and add a CI job that pushes a coauthored commit after passing captcha on our website. It cut the AI slop by 90%. Full write-up https://archestra.ai/blog/only-responsible-ai
- nryoo - 169573 sekunder sedanThe real metric is: does it solve my problem, and is the maintainer still responding to issues? Everything else is just noise.
- Cider9986 - 154608 sekunder sedanIt's not that I hate AI writing, it's just that I hate it.
- matheusmoreira - 137720 sekunder sedanMy first encounter with this was when Anthropic offered like 6 months of Claude Max 20x to open source developers with "5,000+ GitHub stars".
https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss
> Who should apply:
> You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars
I can't blame people for maximizing star counts when benefits like these are tied to them. This is a $200 a month subscription, and it did tempt me a bit... Can't imagine what people would do if some venture capitalist dangled millions in front of them. I suppose they'd do pretty much anything.
It's weird that people are using stars as a signal though. Anyone can star a repository, it's essentially a public bookmark. I think the real popularity signal is the number of people participating in the project.
- ossusermivami - 162676 sekunder sedanwhat is this one about:
> When nobody is forking a 157,000-star repository, nobody is using it
that is completely not true, i don't fork a repo when i use it, only when i want to contribute to it (and usually cleanup my forks)
- dathinab - 161400 sekunder sedanwait people trust GH start for like anything????
- ozgrakkurt - 168115 sekunder sedan> Jordan Segall, Partner at Redpoint Ventures, published an analysis of 80 developer tool companies showing that the median GitHub star count at seed financing was 2,850 and at Series A was 4,980. He confirmed: "Many VCs write internal scraping programs to identify fast growing github projects for sourcing, and the most common metric they look toward is stars."
> Runa Capital publishes the ROSS (Runa Open Source Startup) Index quarterly, ranking the 20 fastest-growing open-source startups by GitHub star growth rate. Per TechCrunch, 68% of ROSS Index startups that attracted investment did so at seed stage, with $169 million raised across tracked rounds. GitHub itself, through its GitHub Fund partnership with M12 (Microsoft's VC arm), commits $10 million annually to invest in 8-10 open-source companies at pre-seed/seed stages based partly on platform traction.
This all smells like BS. If you are going to do an analysis you need to do some sound maths on amount of investment a project gets in relation to github starts.
All this says is stars are considered is some ways, which is very far from saying that you get the fake stars and then you have investment.
This smells like bait for hating on people that get investment
- dr_kretyn - 156933 sekunder sedanCan now someone make analysis of Google Ads fake economy? I'm convinced that the data they share - specifically clicks - is false, and potentially they're paying some fraction to people to click it.
- Applejinx - 153254 sekunder sedanNo wonder I'm getting bombed with spammers: 0.1 fork/star ratio and 0.0527 watcher/star ratio for a 1.1kstar repo.
The thing is, they are all scammers whose emails go unopened… and the tragic thing is, most likely the VCs would require the same treatment if they did get all hyped up and try to get involved in my project.
There is nobody real who's desperately trying to reach me to extend a line of business credit. I'm not working in AI, rather the opposite, was not in crypto, etc etc, so I know it is just email scams from beginning to end, dozens every day.
It's kind of pitiful that if VCs tried to jump in, they would be indistinguishable from the scams.
- k33n - 159312 sekunder sedanI spent a little bit of time at a PE firm last year. They went "all in" on ElizaOS because of the star hype. It was embarrassing.
- onesandofgrain - 159790 sekunder sedanThis is why people shouls use gitea. I dont understand why people keep using github at this point. Its not like theyve stolen all our data or anything:))
- rvz - 166061 sekunder sedanWho ever thought that GitHub stars were a legitimate measure of a project's popularity does not understand Goodhart's Law and such metrics were easily abused, faked, gamed and manipulated.
- kortilla - 166785 sekunder sedanI asked Claude for an analysis on the maturity of various open source projects accomplishing the same thing. Its first searches were for GitHub star counts for each project. I was appalled at how dumb an approach that was and mortified at how many people must be espousing that equivocation online to make the training jump to that.
- scotty79 - 167070 sekunder sedanDefinite proof that github is social network for programmers.
- bjourne - 168513 sekunder sedan> The CMU researchers recommended GitHub adopt a weighted popularity metric based on network centrality rather than raw star counts. A change that would structurally undermine the fake star economy. GitHub has not implemented it.
> As one commenter put it: "You can fake a star count, but you can't fake a bug fix that saves someone's weekend."
I'm curious what the research says here---can you actually structurally undermine the gamification of social influence scores? And I'm pretty sure fake bugfixes are almost trivial to generate by LLMs.
- _blk - 133052 sekunder sedanI'm starstruck. Honestly sad but not surprising since we live in the age where attention is a currency anything will be done to attempt to buy attention.
Just look at how many cool and legit open projects have the star-meter graph in their README.md - so of course people will start measuring against that metric and start gaming it.
I was surprised myself when I suddenly saw a starstruck badge on my profile. I never advertise my projects but I do feel honored when people think that my contributions are useful and stars are an easy way of showing that gratitude. At least I think that's how it was intended. And now someone is breaking that for scraps (or not scraps.)
This is exactly the bs that pushes services to not offer their own logins anymore, now you have to login with FB or GH or $randomFamousSvc instead of the more anonymous "by email" - just happened to me recently when I wanted to use a trial account, but I totally get it - with abuse trust is substituted with control. It's the same everywhere.. even voter ID.
Sorry, that went off track. I guess just don't look at the stars anymore. Wait, no, don't do that, stars are beautiful and so are you if you read all the way to here. Here's a * for you :)
- cat-whisperer - 157430 sekunder sedannow that we have AI, and github is backed by microsoft. we should ask users to justify their stars. and then they should have a classifier
- crazyjudenstern - 145870 sekunder sedanI haven't seen that many stars since the Holocaust.
- fontain - 167742 sekunder sedanhttps://x.com/garrytan/status/2045404377226285538
“gstack is not a hypothetical. It’s a product with real users:
75,000+ GitHub stars in 5 weeks
14,965 unique installations (opt-in telemetry, so real number is at least 2x higher)
305,309 skill invocations recorded since January 2026
~7,000 weekly active users at peak”
GitHub stars are a meaningless metric but I don’t think a high star count necessarily indicates bought stars. I don’t think Garry is buying stars for his project.
People star things because they want to be seen as part of the in-crowd, who knows about this magical futuristic technology, not because they care to use it.
Some companies are buying stars, sure, but the methodology for identifying it in this article is bad.
- drcongo - 165958 sekunder sedanI got gently admonished on here a while back for mentioning that I find those star graph things people put on their READMEs to have entirely the opposite effect than that which was intended. I see one of those and I'm considerably less likely to trust the project because a) you're chasing a stupider metric than lines of code, and b) people obviously buy stars.
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- m00dy - 168890 sekunder sedansame here on HN as well
- RITESH1985 - 166341 sekunder sedanThe fake star problem is a symptom of a deeper issue — developers can't tell signal from noise in the agent ecosystem. The tools that actually get real adoption are the ones that solve acute production problems. Agents are hitting these in production issues of state management every day and there's almost no tooling for it. That's where genuine organic stars come from — solving a real pain, not gaming rankings
Nördnytt! 🤓