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Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market
- siva7 4y agoIs there even such a thing as a github influencer (people living just from github)?
- supriyo-biswas 4y agoPeople working in DevRel often aggregate developer oriented content and gain popularity that way, an example would be "swyx" for example. I'm not taking a dump on his work, but you can see the Github influencer effect over there.
- wodenokoto 4y agoNever heard of swyx. Self proclaimed GitHub star. But still only 5000 followers and projects max out at 8000 stars. I don’t know what I had expected but I think it was bigger numbers than that. https://github.com/sw-yx https://github.com/sw-yx
- delusional 4y agoThe "github star" claim links to the source (it's some github program where you can nominate people to be accepted into some promotion campaign). Saying self proclaimed makes him sound pretentious, it's actually awarded by github.
- latexr 4y agoYou can be factual and still sound pretentious and cringey. Like the medical doctors who insist on being called “doctor”, to the point of smuggly “correcting” strangers in a social setting. I don’t know this user and won’t assume his intentions, but I can see how having “I’m a GitHub star [star emoji]” as the first sentence on the profile is doing him a disservice: it makes it seem like it’s the most impressive thing he’s achieved and diminishes everything else.
- newmac 4y agoFWIW a smug doctor usually corrects people that they are a Physician.
- latexr 4y agoMaybe in English, but in my native tongue there’s no word for physician. Also, I meant in the sense that you call someone “mister McSmug” and they reply almost angrily with “doctor McSmug”.
- swyx 4y agofixed. i wrote that when i was still trying to be approachable and cutesy. now i dont need it lol.
- tylerhannan 4y agoI love the edit in GH. So much. Thank you for the work you do and for how much you have contributed to people learning over the years. <3
- latexr 4y agoTo reiterate, I don’t know you and don’t assume your intentions—and thus do not judge them. I’m also not familiar with your work but I have no doubt it’s more relevant than whatever “star award”. In other words: it makes zero difference to me what you write in your bio though I can see how its previous wording took away from what’s important. I was conveying to the parent comment my understanding of the comment they were replying to. Apologies for making you feel judged, that was not the point. Quite the contrary: I wanted to underline that by not knowing your intentions it does not make sense to criticise how you choose to present yourself.
- swyx 4y agoyup no hard feelings. felt defensive heheh. i guess as my career has gone on i've accumulated other stuff but early on the github star thing really did feel like a big deal + if i wasnt gonna plug it on my github readme where else
- adamgordonbell 4y agoswyx is on hn and legit great writer. He's influenced my thinking in many areas. I've never seen his github account before but I expect that people following him there are doing so because of the content he's putting out. His blog has been on the HN Frontpage many times and has a book about developer career building. My github account isn't as pimped out as his, but marketing yourself isn't toxic, it's smart.
- tbragin 4y agoAgreed that marketing yourself is not toxic. I follow "swyx" on Twitter and find his insight valuable, and so do a lot of my peers. Btw, looks like his Github profile has not been updated for some time - he's no longer Head of DX at Airbyte and is now an independent consultant. https://www.swyx.io/about https://www.swyx.io/about
- swyx 4y agoappreciate it but also whoa this literally just happened and its freaky how up to date you are. consulting is temporary (check out https://www.trychroma.com/ https://www.trychroma.com/ if you are exploring LangChain/OpenAI apps and need an embeddings database) and i'm working on an ai infra startup idea on the side with a couple cofoudners.
- tbragin 4y agoCongrats! I'll be watching :)
- swyx 4y agolove and appreciate your work as well adam (everyone check out Corecursive https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=corecursive.com&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ) i honestly dont even view my github readme as "marketing yourself". most pple dont even go to an individual's profile in the first place, but if you do its kinda like a cute little myspace thing where you can let people know you as a human being and be a little quirky. i certainly dont hold myself out as an authority on writing the best software in the world and hey if 40k stars on the react-typescript stuff doesnt count i'm alright with that
- rozenmd 4y agoI didn't even know Shawn had a popular GitHub, though he has written about the meta-creator ceiling before: https://www.swyx.io/meta-creator-ceiling https://www.swyx.io/meta-creator-ceiling
- swyx 4y agoyeah i also am surprised that people use the follow feature for my work even tho i dont run a popular oss project. well idk what "github influencer" even means but fwiw i am not "people living just from github". ive never taken a dime of github sponsor money. as far as github is concerned i just put my stuff up for free and the github stars program gets me an early look into new features so i can give them feedback. (eg i helped with Hey GitHub before the big launch at GH Universe). obviously i'll happily ambassador github to anyone who will listen but who isnt already on github here
- pictur 4y agoThere are very few people who work like this and are non-toxic.
- bombolo 4y agoI guess the purpose is to find a job as evangelist and similar.
- reidjs 4y agoI have heard of people getting interviews from their GitHub profile.
- ccouzens 4y agoI got my current job through GitHub. At least that's how the 3rd party recruiter told me he found me. It's possible he was lying and thought it would impress me (it did). My profile is more active than most, but very far from rockstar.
- justinclift 4y agoYeah. Several years ago extremely clueless recruiters used to email people heaps. Lots of people were complaining about getting tonnes of spam from them. :( Had to change my Location (or some similar obvious field) in my GitHub profile to "Recruiters FUCK OFF" before they took the hint. ;) Thankfully, GitHub introduced some other way to signal if you are/aren't interested in getting a job (toggle switch?) not long after, which seemed to work.
- deefour 4y agoThere are plenty of people making a living from donations to their open source contributions. It seems odd to title them influencers based on that.
- version_five 4y agoI think it would be tough (a good thing) because how often do people go to someone's root github page, even if they have a good repo? Not to say it never happens, but github is really about the repo, not the person (again a good thing) so it would be harder for an individual to become "influential". Hopefully nobody gets any ideas.
- blitzar 4y agoI am going start posting linkedin influencer style "content" on my github for clout.
- Hackbraten 4y agoTwenty pull requests every morning. That’s my plan for 2024.
- azu 4y agohttps://press.stripe.com/working-in-public https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public The book presents similar stories.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoI’ve seen a number of resumes where people convey the popularity of their personal projects by number of stars or number of downloads.
- hoofhearted 4y agoTaylor Otwell lol.. He has some pretty dope cars in his garage and is doing well. I follow him on GitHub, and pay for some of his products. I have been heavily influenced by his coding styles, and the tools he uses. His code just looks so tight and perfect. He writes his stuff so open ended and reusable that he basically writes a method once, and then reuses it across numerous projects. Look at this tight code: https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/10.x/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/10.x/src/Illuminat... I’d say that Adam Wathan is rapidly growing his influence as well, and is probably doing alright too.
- jorgesborges 4y agoThe multiple-line comment styling is so pleasingly pathological — each descending line has a few characters less than the last.
- thih9 4y ago> In spam detection, we often use heuristics in conjunction with machine learning to identify spammers. Heuristics can only be used to identify suspected spammers. Not everyone who behaves like a spammer is a spammer, it could be e.g. a random user with privacy settings on, or someone who didn’t update their bio in a while and it got affected by link rot, etc. Even if a group of low activity accounts stars the same projects, it could be that the account owners just discuss these projects elsewhere.
- GlumWoodpecker 4y agoThe article notes this, and like any spam detection method, it has a degree of false positives, but it seems very low (less than a percent according to the article). I'm sure an official implementation of this could take more internal, non-public factors into account, like IP addresses and clustering of account creation times, to make it even more accurate and drastically reduce the amount of spam users.
- andreareina 4y agoThe claim I saw in the article is 98% precision. Which doesn't actually tell us the predictive value without the base rate which seems to be all over the place.
- sgammon 4y agothis shouldn't be posted with links to the actual places to buy stars.... that seems like a bad idea?
- lessname 4y agoWhy? You can find these websites anyway if you search for terms like "buy github stars"
- optimalsolver 4y agoWhat's the street value?
- robin_reala 4y agoIt’s in the article.
- perihelions 4y agoGoodhart's law: if you rely on a social signal to tell you what's good, you'll break that signal. Very soon, the domain of bullshit will extend to actual text. We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments -- and you can get them to say "this GitHub repo is the best", or "this startup is the real deal". Won't that be fun?
- GlumWoodpecker 4y agoThe scary part is that this doesn't seem too far off, with the current proliferation of large language models like the GPTs..
- rzzzt 4y agoParent was definitely not referring to these at all /s
- perihelions 4y ago(I ninja-edited my comment in the first minute; the parent might have responded to a less clear version, since they posted at +3 minutes. I added "AI" in a revision).
- rzzzt 4y agoOK, sounds reasonable. I didn't see the edit either, was just thinking about the myriad of LLM articles on the front page recently.
- quickthrower2 4y agoYou sound way too human to be an AI then
- dang 4y agoIf you want to, you can always set 'delay' in your profile to the number of minutes (up to 10) that you would like your comments to be visible only to you. This puts the stealth back in stealth editing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html I rely heavily on this because it's somehow only after the comment is 'real' (i.e. staring back at me from a real HN thread) that I notice most of the edits I want to make.
- yla92 4y agoTIL: you can buy (fake) GitHub stars. That was a bit shocking to me to learn.
- quickthrower2 4y ago/s ?? I always expected there was a market for fake stars. I am trying to get a repo naturally to 1000 stars, but I would never buy them.
- sorokod 4y agoCan you explain why is it "natural" to try to get your repo to have many stars in a world where starts can be bought?
- s9w 4y agomost people don't know that stars are bought
- quickthrower2 4y agoNatural: promote the repo, people see it and like it. I don’t beg for them. Unnatural: pay some bot runner to buy stars. I prefer natural as the stars are a metric not an end goal.
- sorokod 4y agoRight, was not asking what you mean by natural but rather why is it of any value.
- quickthrower2 4y agoI see. I just see it as an indicator of reach. Also some people with snap judge a project by number of stars and more likely use it if it has a bunch.
- 4y ago
- groffee 4y ago[dead]
- amsterdorn 4y agoGitHub is fully aware of these, would they consider something like a "confirmed" star count that subtracts the suspicious/fake number? Or is that too much of a slippery slope.
- mapmeld 4y agoGitHub gradually removes these users as they catch up to them, so not helpful to have extra steps. I have a couple of repos which were briefly popular, so when a new user stars it today, and I see 1000s of other stars, it's suspicious and I get a peek into their world. There are obvious numeric usernames, but also fake orgs with repos for the users to fork and interact with, and a few account takeovers (i.e. someone had signed up for GitHub in 2015 to make a free wedding website, abandoned it, and the account fell into spammer hands). These used to be easier to report.
- Azadzadeh 4y ago>GitHub gradually removes these users as they catch up to them With collaterals too I presume [1]. I guess I've been the victim of some automated system. They have banned my account without warning or explanation and they've been ignoring my support tickets for about 2 months! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817163
- account42 4y ago> They have banned my account without warning or explanation and they've been ignoring my support tickets for about 2 months! Which is especially ridiculous if this was due to a false positive spam detection as real spammers will not bother with chasing support when new accounts can be created easily.
- lessname 4y agoHow did you find out the name of the company behind GitHub24 though? If I go to their website I do cannot see it, I even cannot find anything if I search the company name.
- cyberia23424 4y agoPerhaps they got it via payment info
- gerogerke 4y agoI was also surprised when I saw it. A GbR is a German "Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts" which does not need to be formally incorporated and offers no limited liability. The name needs to include the names of all partners, so we can deduce it is being run by two persons. I am quite surprised they do this without liability protection. Upon googling, I found only a playlist on YouTube which has this name and contains one explainer video about signing up a company with German tax authorities. If they are indeed based in Germany, they're required to have an Impressum / imprint on their home-page, without it, they risk being fined.
- JaDogg 4y agoJust use Show HN & Reddit.
- Ralfp 4y agoThose never worked for me. Show HN: there are maybe dozens of those posted everyday but they rarely hit main page. Reddit ad is great to kick off the star growth, but unless you have something interesting to many people, don’t expect more than 50 stars on first day and plateau to a star every few days. Most GH stars I’ve got was from somebody mentioning my project in comment in some heated discussion on HN. So I guess drama sells?
- coolsank 4y agoIs it just me or the fact that Dagster has one of their competitors Mage.ai listed here as a repo with around 15% of fake stars seems like an odd coincidence?
- say_it_as_it_is 4y agoIt shouldn't be a surprise. Why are you surprised? Do you often pursue random activities irrelevant to your life for dozens of hours?
- coolsank 4y agoYes I do.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoPretty standard for anyone ND
- janalsncm 4y agoIf you’re going to accuse a competitor of fraud, writing a blog post showing your work seems like the most safe way to do it. People lie with statistics all the time of course.
- speedgoose 4y agoThey don’t mention what I think is their biggest competitor: Prefect.
- frasermarlow 4y ago[Blogpost author here] We ran the numbers for Prefect and several other repos in our space and they came out clean. As we note in the article, while some repos game the system, from what we can tell the number of abusers is actually fairly small.
- julienfr112 4y ago
- saurik 4y ago> Yet [GitHub stars] influence serious, high stakes decisions, including which projects get used by enterprises, which startups get funded, and which companies talented professionals join. Really? I honestly just don't believe this... if I were to believe this, I think I'd have to conclude the world is just too broken to bother rescuing.
- rossmohax 4y agoMore than once I've seen when number of stars was an argument to decide whether to pull dependency or write our own.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoPeople use flawed but easily consumable metrics to make almost all decisions. It takes a lot more effort to collect multiple metrics along different axes, understand the skew/bias of them and make an informed decision. Visibility and ease of consumption are the most important aspects of a metric if you want people to use it.
- saurik 4y agoThe list in the article, though, was carefully selected to presume competent people doing the decision-making. I totally believe many people use that star count for something... but an "enterprise"? someone investing non-trivial amount should of money? a specifically-"talented professional"? I just find that really difficult to believe. I've sold software to enterprise, I've worked with a number of venture capital funds, and I know a ton of actually-talented professionals... I dare say most of them consider GitHub's social features to be a joke. The enterprises I deal with cared almost exclusively about stuff like license choices, support contract options, and "invoice billing" ;P. The vetting process I've dealt with at VCs was intense, having worked both sides of that situation; and I know multiple people who have worked data science jobs at such firms to try to better select investments. As for a "talented professional", I can pretty much guarantee they are going to look at your codebase, not the number of stars it has, while they evaluate any number of more reasonable things to judge an opportunity on (commute, pay, management style, etc.). A key property of competent deciders is that they aren't using trivial metrics.
- newmac 4y agoI think the most interesting thing would be to run this test against the list of Launch HNs, sorted by votes, grouped by class.
- NiloCK 4y agoI have a half-written article about this, but I didn't have any good notion about quantifying the problem so this article is very welcome info to me. My own angle is that copilot has shifted the incentives around this practice, maybe substantially. Businesses want to get (free tiers of) their paid SaaS endpoints into copilot suggestions - it's a great funnel! I'd guess that github is as likely as not to become an SEO spam battlefield (like the rest of the web).
- UncleEntity 4y ago> Businesses want to get (free tiers of) their paid SaaS endpoints into copilot suggestions - it's a great funnel! That’s so brilliantly evil… I can see the next generation of “how I got to $3m in passive income” articles being written (by ChatGPT) right now.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoI wrote a tiny tool which calculates the "brightness" score of a github repo based on calculating the total star count of the people who starred your repo. It will automatically detect these kinds of scams (assuming that it's mostly low star bots giving the stars). https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Bright https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Bright Edit: I love clustering, I really do, but I think that techniques like the one I am using are far superior to unsupervised learning for trying to detect fake accounts in this context.
- newmac 4y agoIt is worth noting that it is trivial to buy fake stars for a project you are not affiliated with. The reason someone might do this would be to "test" the purchasing of fake stars without risking contaminating their own project.
- nvr219 4y agoI once bought a friend of mine a thousand Twitter followers as a prank. He wasn't happy.
- i_am_toaster 4y agoAs he should be, that wasn’t a well thought through prank.
- moneywoes 4y agoWhere did you purchase that?
- nvr219 4y agoI wanna say I got it through Fiverr? This was like 8-10 years ago. I don't remember exactly.
- lozenge 4y agoThe projects with suspicious stars were still >80% nonfake stars. That to me suggests that most of the fake stars have been classified as nonfake. There isn't much psychological value in boosting your star count by just 25%.
- bart_spoon 4y agoDepends on when the fake stars were created. If they are early in a projects life cycle, they may be used to get attention on the project, and once they have awareness, fake stars are no longer necessary.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> And if you enjoy this article, head on over to the Dagster repo and give us a real GitHub star! Kind of ironic that they’re using blog articles and social media to pander for more stars on their GitHub project.
- pythonguython 4y agoI wouldn’t describe that as ironic.
- debarshri 4y agoWhile evaluting OSS project, key indicator is community activity. Github stars is a weak community activity indicator. Firstly, as shown in the article it can be gamed. Also, Stars is very low threshold action so does not indicate whether the person who starred the project will actually use it. I think 2 great community activity indicators are - Github issues and of slack/discord/discourse comments. One key thing with github issues in my opinions is that, If the github issues are mostly by the core team, it is not a great sign. You want a large mix of issues from customers or users and not from the team. This is a good indicator if the project is solving real problem or not. Stars is very low threshold action. Same goes with the slack comments, it should have both volume and freshness.
- jmclnx 4y agoI think checking if people donates to a project is a better indicator to the value of the project than the stars. I never paid attention to stars.
- debarshri 4y agoBut there are OSS projects that are VC backed. They don't take donations.
- _cenw 4y agoThat's already a very different deal then, no need to gauge repository health, you know there's a good chance of work suddenly ceasing.
- debarshri 4y agoYou have a point. I have often seen OSS projects being funded on the basis of github stars with no revenue whereas all the parameters show that the project health is not that great.
- boxed 4y agoDonating to yourself would be pretty cheap...
- penguin_booze 4y agoMy ex-employer used Github stars in their job description and during recruitement pitches. They regularly encouraged employees to go and star the firm's repos in Github. In all-hands meetings, the Github stars were one of the items they reported: "we've surpassed X in Github stars" (applause). (The firm X, however, is a more well-known name than my ex-employer was). A while ago, I listened to a Freakonomics episode where it was discussed that businesses use proxies to both boost their image and to cover up their incompetency. The example was that a lot of businesses chose fancy names starting with A (like, AAA plumbers), so that they get listed first in business directories. These firms were later proven to be very incompetent and/or even fraudulent. The relevant paper, also cited in the episode, was "A Business by Any Other Name": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1667550 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1667550.
- goodoldneon 4y agoThey were incompetent because they didn’t have enough As. I exclusively use AAAAAAAAAAAA Plumbers
- photochemsyn 4y agoApparently seven is the sweet spot for visual recognition at a glance, so I'd go with AAAAAAA Plumbers instead.
- willcipriano 4y agoAaaaaah real plumbers
- moneywoes 4y agoPodcast episode name please
- shagie 4y agoNot sure if this is it, but 552. Is Google Getting Worse has the 'AAA Plumbers' in it. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/
- dnchdnd 4y agoonly vaguely related - but I've been recently trying out dagster and I'm pretty impressed so far. I've run large scale data-processing from Hadoop onwards and was expecting the usual crumminess whenever you hit and edge case. Instead I found a system that seems to be thoughtfully designed and, crucially, easy to debug.
- erlend_sh 4y agoGreat post, though I was low-key hoping for a top 10 or maybe top 100 ranking of most starred juiced-up repos.
- _8j50 4y agoI didn't knoe people used stars to make decisions. For me it is more like HN karma points. I use their issue history/pr history to get an idea of how good or bad a project is
- ziml77 4y agoI'm surprised that Github stars are valuable enough to buy. Personally I never look at the star count because even if they were legit, they don't really tell me anything more useful than I get from looking at other things in the repo. I tend to check the age difference between the earliest and latest commits because that lets me be sure it's not a project that someone spent a couple weeks coding up, dropped on github, and then forgot about. I'll also check the issues on there. I'm looking for more closed issues than open ones, but I'll also quickly scan over them to get a rough idea of how many are truly meaningful issues. I also get signals from the readme and docs. It's not a hard pass if there's issues with those, but it's certainly helpful to my opinion if they exist and are both clear and detailed.
- loeg 4y agoI mean based on the number of repos they identified buying stars and prices advertised, the revenue just doesn’t make sense. The sellers have made like, hundreds of dollars at most. How much effort have they invested for this meager return?
- cdiamand 4y agoI find stars helpful when I'm evaluating several different repos to choose a particular tool for a job. If one of the repos has many more stars, I weigh that strongly when choosing. Freshness of commits is definitely important, but for me the fact that many other people starred the repo shows that there are eyeballs and activity.
- version_five 4y agoI'll admit I've used them. In particular, I've used paperswithcode to find implementations of ML models. There are often a number of implementations of the same model, and the quality is highly variable. I've used stars (which paperswithcode displays) as a pre-screen. Spoiler alert, the highest started implementations are not always the best. But it still helps to triage, as a proxy for how well used it is
- Takennickname 4y agoYou are likely not important enough to scam. The first people I can imagine this being shown to are VCs in pitch decks who are only going to see this on a powerpoint and not actually on github. Very unlikely the VC will check github itself to verify the number, and if they do, even less likely they'll verify that the stars are real. You're the kind that checks everything. Even if you had something valuable, a scammer wouldn't waste their time with you then there are easier fish to bait.
- tpoacher 4y agoI have moved all my repositories to sourcehut. They are generally mirrored by a github repository consisting of a single README file explaining the new location for the project, and my reasons for the migration. However, given sourcehut eschews the use such "social metrics" (which at some level I agree with the principle behind it, on the other hand I do appreciate the value of being able to give visibility to good projects) I usually mention in my README that "If you like the project and wish to promote it, feel free to star this github page". I'm sure github probably wouldn't like this use-case, but the stars would certainly be genuine, even if possibly quite dodgy-looking.
- wakeupcall 4y agoI have moved repositories off github, replaced the README with a warning and the new location and archived the project. It's still getting starred...
- pbronez 4y agoI’m conflicted about this. Sourcehut, Codeberg, etc are great. But having everything I’m looking for on GitHub is extremely convenient. I use the “Add to List” function extensively for bookmarking.
- tpoacher 4y agoYes, this is why I didn't want to migrate without leaving a trace on github. The redirecting README on github is a good compromise, I think. Having said that, it may be worth thinking what is the price we may be paying as a community for this convenience, btw. MS Github is clearly already past the "embrace" phase, and well into the "extend" phase.
- Xeoncross 4y agoRabbit trail: I accidentally right-clicked on their home icon and it brought up their branding page with license agreements for their IP. Really neat idea.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- precompute 4y agoThis sort of gamification exists only because there are too many green engineers that only care about their salaries, and they mimic what people successfully recruited by FAANG (etc.) did, and so do other companies. Then this purity spirals into taking the entire field down because there's no one around to educate the new newbies. Facebook was IMO a step in the right direction because it was a "general" social network, you could post anything. Imagine if FB had released some sort of an "extension" that allowed you to share anything via a template of sorts, instead of having to type out everything in the same old text post. It would have been meta enough (sorry) to not spiral very quickly. Leaving the arena is the only viable option. Software projects that aren't dependent on github drive their own vehicle, everyone else is on a crowded bus.
- franciscop 4y agoI wrote on this topic a while ago; experimenting I found out you can basically change the repos names and keep the stars; this wouldn't work if you use the repo as issue tracker or PR tracker, since the history would all be broken, but if it's pretty much just the code it's easy to swap the star count between two repos: https://francisco.io/blog/transferring-github-stars/ https://francisco.io/blog/transferring-github-stars/
- Kalanos 4y agodo streamlit
- bdcravens 4y agoSounds like they take it more serious than Google does likes on Youtube. A competitor had a video that rapidly had over 100k likes - but if you looked at the total time played, each view averaged to just a couple of seconds on a video over 10 minutes. Reported it, but nothing came of it. (No, not something we regularly do. I think it may be the only video I've ever reported; just want a fair playing field)
- dylan604 4y agoyoutube competitor. that's just funny to me. kind of even comes across as petty. you took however much time to investigate average viewed time of a competitor and then cried to daddy about the perceived slight in "advantage" instead of taking that time to improve your competing product to make it better.
- UncleEntity 4y agoUmm… I think you have it backwards, the other video was using fake likes to avoid having to improve their quality to get an equal number of eyeballs.
- bdcravens 4y agoTruth rises to the occasion. All these years later, they're sitting at 2.3 stars on Google, even though they charge less, and we are sitting on 5 :-)
- bdcravens 4y agoNo, we had someone show up out the blue, with no established presence in the space, with a video with hundreds of thousands of views. Was curious how they were so viral so fast. Overall, it's bad for everyone if someone can create fraudulent views: us, other companies, and most importantly, consumers. > taking that time to improve your competing product to make it better. Took less than 3 minutes to do the math and send the report. I'm a fast developer, but I can't improve our product that fast :-)
- oefrha 4y ago
- rootsudo 4y agoThis is a great article, I've developed the same tactics for other projects but never was able to graft the proper vernacular. It really helps tackling how to organize and present information. I wonder if this is also in general OSINT or ISC^2 training - everything this article showed for breadtrails and reverse operation (e.g. pay a company to do the work, see how it is, evaluate the results, see if you can find other work similar/akin to it.)
- malshe 4y agoI give Github star as a bookmark for the repo so I assumed that others might be using it the same way too.
- woodruffw 4y agoThings like this are part of why I cringe when I see supply chain analysis/security companies include “popularity” in their criticality metrics: the relationship between public popularity signals (like GitHub stars) and criticality is weak, at best.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoIn my experience, it's actually a great signal. That's why so many people rely on it. The distribution of GitHub stars is an extreme power law.[1] Stargazer thresholds are used by maintainers to make decisions on including projects for different purposes from dependency management to package manager maintainers deciding to list software by name.[2] [1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/github-statistics https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/github-statistics [2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Acceptable-Casks.md#rejected-casks https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Acceptable...
- woodruffw 4y agoSelection suitability and criticality are different metrics. The former is what Homebrew uses, as a way to lessen maintainer load and prevent inclusion in Homebrew becoming its own quality signal. The latter is what I’ve seen supply chain companies provide: an implication that a project is somehow critical or essential to the overall ecosystem because it has so-and-so many stars. That first use is not unreasonable, in my opinion. The second one is questionable, at best.
- toastal 4y agoMaybe our code forges don't need to be social media platforms. These 'stars' have pretty dubious value and rarely correlate with code quality or importance (core libraries generally have less attention than apps or tools). There's also a heavy language skew where JavaScript and Python libraries & programs get way more thumbs-ups even when they're technically not any better than alternatives.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThe next thing in social media vending machines. https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/status/871842008771567618 https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/status/87184200877156761...
- thewizl 4y agoAs a note, GitHub stars are often used in pitch decks for OSS startups. VCs seem to care about that, judging from what I’ve seen around.