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GitHub's fake star economy
- Cider9986 6mo agoIt's not that I hate AI writing, it's just that I hate it.
- dfhvneoieno 6mo ago[dead]
- Oras 6mo agoWould be nice to see the ratio of OpenClaw stars
- az226 6mo ago99% stars from Claws themselves
- scotty79 6mo agoDefinite proof that github is social network for programmers.
- talsania 6mo agoSeen this firsthand, repos with hundreds of stars and zero meaningful commits or issues. In hardware/RTL projects it's less prominent.
- dafi70 6mo agoHonest 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who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated.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.
- askl 6mo agoStars are a simple metric even someone like a VC investor can understand. Your "better system" sounds far too complicated and time consuming.
- HighlandSpring 6mo agoI 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
- 3form 6mo agoIt would be more resilient indeed, I think. Definitely needs a way to figure out which users should have a good score, though - otherwise it's just shifting the problem somewhat. Perhaps it could be done with a reputation type of approach, where the initial reputation would be driven by a pool of "trusted" open source contributors from some major projects. That said, I believe the core problem is that GitHub belongs to Microsoft, and so it will still go more towards operating like a social network than not - i.e. engagement matters. It will still take a good will to get rid of Social Network Disease at scale.
- az226 6mo agoReputation doesn’t equal good taste in judging other projects. There are much better ways of finding those who have good taste.
- az226 6mo agoGitHub has all kinds of private internal metrics that could update the system to show a much higher signal/quality score. A score that is impervious to manipulation. And extremely well correlated with actual quality and popularity and value, not noise. Two projects could look exactly the same from visible metrics, and one is complete shell and the other a great project. But they choose not to publish it. And those same private signals more effectively spot the signal-rich stargazers than PageRank.
- Topfi 6mo agoI 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.
- Miraltar 6mo agoCiting Valve as a model for handling cheating is not what I'd have reached for.
- Topfi 6mo agoHonest question, which companies handle the process better given it is a trade-off? Yes, VAC is not as iron-clad as kernel level solutions can be, but the latter is overly invasive for many users. I'd argue neither is the objectively right or better approach here and Valves approach of longer term data collection and working on ML solutions that have the potential to catch even those cheating methods currently able to bypass kernel level anti-cheat is a good step. On Github stars, I'd argue they are the most suitable comparison, as all the funny business regarding stars should be, if at all, detectable by Github directly and ideally, bans would have the biggest deterrent effect, if they happened in larger waves, allowing the community to see who did engage in fraudulent behaviour.
- luke5441 6mo agoThe problem is that if this is the game now, you need to play it. I'm trying to get a new open source project off the ground and now I wonder if I need to buy fake stars. Or buy the cheapest kind of fake stars for my competitors so they get deleted. For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.
- superdisk 6mo agoAn open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.
- Lapel2742 6mo agoI do not look at the stars. I look at the list of contributors, their activities and the bug reports / issues.
- est 6mo ago> I look at the list of contributors Specifically if those avatars are cute animie girls.
- tomaytotomato 6mo ago> Specifically if those avatars are cute anime girls. I know you are half joking/not joking, but this is definitely a golden signal.
- mrweasel 6mo agoYeah, I didn't think anyone would place any actual value on the stars. It almost doesn't need to be a feature, because what is it suppose to do exactly?
- apples_oranges 6mo agoI look at the starts when choosing dependencies, it's a first filter for sure. Good reminder that everything gets gamed given the incentives.
- moffkalast 6mo agoAverage case of "once a measure becomes a target".
- msdz 6mo ago> I look at the starts when choosing dependencies, it's a first filter for sure. Unfortunately I still look at them, too, out of habit: The project or repo's star count _was_ a first filter in the past, and we must keep in mind it no longer is. > Good reminder that everything gets gamed given the incentives. Also known as Goodhart's law [1]: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Essentially, VCs screwed this one up for the rest of us, I think? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- yuppiepuppie 6mo ago> The project or repo's star count _was_ a first filter in the past, and we must keep in mind it no longer is. Id suggest the first question to ask is "if the project is an AI project or not?" If it is, dont pay attention to the stars - if it's not, use the stars as a first filter. That's the way I analyse projects on Github now.
- GrinningFool 6mo ago> The project or repo's star count _was_ a first filter in the past, a I agree that it has been a first filter, but should it ever have been? A star only says that someone had a passing interest in a project. Not significantly different from a 'like' on a social media post.
- lkm0 6mo agoWe're this close to rediscovering pagerank
- TheTaytay 6mo agoI was literally was just looking at GitHub dataset availability and musing on this. A star from karpathy is worth a lot more than a star from open_claw_dood that just created his account 5 min ago. In general, I’ve been dissatisfied with GitHub’s code search. It would be nice to see innovation here.
- ricardo81 6mo agoIt'd ideally be more of a peoplerank though. I think Google discovered this problem themselves when Pagerank became a well known thing. You'd want to discard a lot of the noise in the bottom 20% of linking power. You want to focus more on the 'trust' factor.
- AKSF_Ackermann 6mo agoSo, 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?
- ModernMech 6mo agoThe next step after that is going to be celebrity forks -- whether top devs and/or Milla Jovovich have forked your repo.
- anant-singhal 6mo agoSeen 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.
- elashri 6mo agoI 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.
- QuantumNomad_ 6mo agoNever heard of it before. https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep Sounds useful. I’ll star it and check it out later ;)
- nryoo 6mo agoThe real metric is: does it solve my problem, and is the maintainer still responding to issues? Everything else is just noise.
- aledevv 6mo ago> 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.
- williamdclt 6mo agoWell, pretty sure that VCs are more interested in popularity than in quality so maybe it's not such a bad metric for them.
- aledevv 6mo agoYes, you're right, but popularity becomes fleeting without real quality behind the projects. Hype helps raise funds, of course, and sells, of course. But it doesn't necessarily lead to long-term sustainability of investments.
- ozgrakkurt 6mo agoVast majority of mid level experienced people take stars very seriously and they won't use anything under 100 stars. I'm not supporting this view but it is what it is unfortunately. VCs that invest based on stars do know something I guess or they are just bad investors. IMO using projects based on start count is terrible engineering practice.
- aledevv 6mo agoalso and above all because it can be easily manipulated, as the research explained in the article actually demonstrates
- 6mo ago
- nottorp 6mo agoWhy 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.
- Topfi 6mo agoAm very much the same, took a bunch private two years ago for multitude of reasons. I can, however, see why no public repos could be a partial indicator and of concern, in conjunction with sudden star growth, simply because it is hard for a person with no prior project to suddenly and publicly strike gold. Even on Youtube it is a rare treat to stumble across a well made video by a small channel and without algos to surface repos on Github in the same way, any viral success from a previously inactive account should be treated with some suspicion. Same the other way, if you never made any PR, etc. sudden engagement is a bit odd.
- nottorp 6mo agoI think they're using it as a signal for the accounts doing the starring, not the account being starred...
- spocchio 6mo agoI 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.
- m00dy 6mo agosame here on HN as well
- onesandofgrain 6mo agoYep, shilling and paid advertisement mascerading as posts espegially on ai
- giannicmptr1000 6mo agoreally hilarious the irony, i agree
- tomhow 6mo agoThe software to detect voting manipulation, collusion abd sockpuppet/astroturf commenting on HN is both the oldest and the most actively developed, and is the main reason it’s considered a strong signal of credibility when a project makes it to the front page. The service that claims to sell upvotes has never had any impact on HN.
- socketcluster 6mo agoMy project https://github.com/socketCluster/socketcluster 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?
- glouwbug 6mo agoThat’s okay. I’m there with you too with about the same cumulative. I measure my own projects by the enjoyment I got out of them. No sense in chasing validation from others when ones only metric will forever be what’s in their own control.
- bjourne 6mo ago> 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.
- az226 6mo agoI’d say those CMU researchers are out of touch with the reality. GitHub can easily overhaul this with a much better system than what those researchers recommended but chooses not to.
- evilsocket 6mo agothat's exactly the next-round attack. StarScout's network-centrality defense works for the current generation of campaigns but won't survive LLM-generated PR/commit patterns
- ozgrakkurt 6mo ago> 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
- fontain 6mo agohttps://x.com/garrytan/status/2045404377226285538 https://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.
- evilsocket 6mo ago[dead]
- eddythompson80 6mo agoGarry Tan is an imbecile though.
- ernst_klim 6mo agoI 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.
- lukan 6mo agoThe issues page used to be good for this as well. What kind of problems people are having. (Sometimes still is, but the agents garbage does not help)
- onion2k 6mo agogiven that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy Imagine you're choosing between 3 different alternatives, and each is 100,000 LOC. Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy. Stars isn't a good one because it's an untrusted source. Something like a referral would be much better, but in a space where your network doesn't have much knowledge a proxy like stars is the only option.
- ernst_klim 6mo ago> Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy. 100k is small, but you're right, it can be millions. I usually skim through the code tho, and it's not that hard. I don't need to fully read and understand the code. What I look at is: high-level architecture (is there any, is it modular or one big lump of code, how modular it is, what kind of modules and components it has and how they interact), code quality (structuring, naming, aesthetics), bus factor (how many people contribute and understand the code base).
- readthedangcode 6mo ago
- kortilla 6mo agoI 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.
- RITESH1985 6mo ago[flagged]
- gslin 6mo ago* https://dagster.io/blog/fake-stars 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13459 (2024/2025) - Six Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Spams, and Malware
- rvz 6mo agoWho 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.
- donatj 6mo agoI 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.
- utopiah 6mo ago> When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric as they say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
- kindkang2024 6mo agoNice to know the name for this — Goodhart's Law. And I think the core reason is that the cost to fake these metrics is far less than what they claim to represent. Stars, reviews, ratings, trading volumes — all cheap to manufacture, and only getting cheaper with AI. I've been thinking about this a lot. These metrics are all just marketing signals to draw people's attention, trying to make some kind of deals. So the fix should be: make the cost of the signal match what it claims to represent. I'm obsessed with something called DUKI /djuːki/ (Decentralized Universal Kindness Income, a form of UBI) — the idea is that instead of stars or reviews, trust comes from deals pledging real money to the world for all as the deal happens. You can't fake that cheaply. So the metric becomes the money itself — if you fake X amount, it costs you X, and the world will thank you by paying attention... Imagine if GitHub let you back a star with real money — the more you put in, the more credible the star. And that money goes out as UBI for everyone. For attention makers, star anything you want, as much as you want. For attention takers, just follow the money to filter through all the noise that's so easy to manipulate...
- drcongo 6mo agoI 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.
- umrashrf 6mo agoThe stick of God doesn't make sound. God's work indeed
- gobdovan 6mo agoThese 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.
- vachina 6mo agoIt all boils down to making more money.
- philipallstar 6mo agoOf course - money is a good proxy for value in these instances. Not perfect, but good.
- gobdovan 6mo agoYeah, but it's not a great way to do it. Short term, you pay the cost of fake signaling, which is simply deadweight loss. People spend resources to inflate signals instead of improving the actual thing. Medium term, I suppose you could see how it increases consumption, since users would probably try something with 100k stars instead of 2, GitHub wants to seem that it's used more than it really is, repo owner is also benefiting. Long term, the correspondence between how important a (distorted) system is perceived (Github, OSS, IT in general) vs how important it really is collapses quite abruptly and unnecessarily, and you end up with a lemon market [0] where signals stop being reliable at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- tsylba 6mo agoPersonally 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.
- mentalgear 6mo ago> 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.
- readthedangcode 6mo agoI usually just read the dang code.
- duzer65657 6mo agoI tend to look at other people involved, like contributors but not just the volume but actual people and their other activity. If the original author is still around and active that tends to be a good sign IME
- consp 6mo agoOverly verbose and "glitter" readme.md files is a good indicator of bad projects or at least projects which need more attention to be used. It's too often pre-rugpull or look-at-me repos where better solutions are one click away. Finding any curse words in hidden comments in the commit history is for me a good indication of a human working on a passion project, though ymmv. And there are always exceptions to the exception of the exceptions.
- hnmullany 6mo agoI 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.
- ricardo81 6mo agoSame 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.
- mercurialsolo 6mo agoStars are like for developers? and you have a bunch of creators now entering the arena. what did you expect?
- whatisthiseven 6mo agoI 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.
- netdevphoenix 6mo ago> I don't think I have ever used stars in making a decision to use a library and I don't understand why anyone would. You might not have but the makers of dependencies that you use might so still problematic.
- whatisthiseven 6mo agoTrue, but that is beyond my control. I am not evaluating every package within a dependency tree unless something happens, out of practicality. I have limited time on this Earth and at my employer. My job is not critical to life. I am comfortable with this level of pragmatism.
- netdevphoenix 6mo agoThe same response applies to the dependencies that you choose.
- psychoslave 6mo ago
- mercurialsolo 6mo agoCost of signalling is way lesser than the cost of verification.
- ildari 6mo agoBots 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 https://archestra.ai/blog/only-responsible-ai
- ossusermivami 6mo agowhat 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)
- mlpotato 6mo agoI 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.
- mankins 6mo agoThat sounds closer to achieving a good outcome. Of course I think anything that includes the set of all users as columns will be game-able. You need to either choose the set yourself from "trusted peers" or "foaf" degrees, or maybe better use retroactive signals rather than purely like-driven approaches.
- mercurialsolo 6mo ago15 mins into this - Built this to identify the fraudsters https://github.com/mercurialsolo/realstars https://github.com/mercurialsolo/realstars We should do a hall of shame!
- therepanic 6mo agoIt's a pity that no one will ever see this 15-minute slop.
- cmrdporcupine 6mo agoCan you vibe code up a firefox plugin, too?
- ImJasonH 6mo agoWhy would OpenAI have bought stars for openai-fm I wonder?
- 9cb14c1ec0 6mo agoGithub 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.
- mauvehaus 6mo agoCan 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_seasons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cleveland_Browns_seaso... I think their record speaks for itself. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy
- gk-- 6mo ago> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric sounds like how the ufc does it
- xnorswap 6mo agoI don't follow American Football so I don't know how coaching contracts work for you guys, but how does someone go 1W 15L one season, survive as head coach to go 0W 16L the next season, and still start the next season after that as head coach? Over here the fans would be singing "You're getting sacked in the morning" halfway through that first season. I guess not having relegation makes things slightly less ruthless for you.
- bombcar 6mo agoOwners don’t care about winning, but about profitability. And you can make a lot of money with a failing football team (selling/trading draft picks, etc) and your fans get used to losing …
- dathinab 6mo agowait people trust GH start for like anything????
- jimmypk 6mo ago[flagged]
- mvvl 6mo agoTbh, 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.
- onesandofgrain 6mo agoThis 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:))
- feverzsj 6mo agoMaybe there is also fake upvote economy here.
- k33n 6mo agoI 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.
- T3RMINATED 6mo ago[dead]
- tonmoy 6mo agoSteam 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
- whilenot-dev 6mo agoBesides the ability to downvote comments after passing a threshold of 500, what else is HN karma good for?
- tonmoy 6mo agoWho knows? The way things are going VCs could start asking claude to review someone’s online presence and Claude might decide karma is the best metric for that
- whilenot-dev 6mo agoI don't mean hypothetical things... are there any more thresholds that unlock functionality?
- tiffanyh 6mo agoFor 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.
- allgirl 6mo ago[dead]
- Grappelli 6mo ago[flagged]
- cat-whisperer 6mo agonow 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
- art_mach 6mo agoYeah, 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 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 https://github.com/apache/airflow - watch: 777, forks 16.9k!!!!!, Stars: (only!) 45.1k - issues: 1200 (!!!), PR-s (501!!!).
- arbot360 6mo agoClearly this means new SaaS companies need to start buying forks, issues and PRs for their repos now too.
- dxtrous 5mo agoA 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.
- dr_kretyn 6mo agoCan 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- shantnutiwari 6mo agoSocial 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...
- ludjer 6mo agoWait I can sell my github account for 5k ? Wow
- pascal-maker 6mo agoVery 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.
- Silamoth 6mo ago> Andrej Karpathy…is the most famous person on Git Hub Is he really? I’ve only heard of him because HN is obsessed with his “AI” takes. Is he really that popular outside of this bubble?
- pascal-maker 6mo agoIf you asked a typical person outside of San Francisco or Silicon Valley, nine times out of ten they wouldn’t have a clue who he is. However, as a co-founder of OpenAI and the former Director of AI at Tesla, he is widely known and respected in the tech world—especially for coining the term 'vibecoding.'" He comes in as second on the list of Github Users Global Ranking right behind mister linux: https://wangchujiang.com/github-rank/ https://wangchujiang.com/github-rank/.
- pdyc 6mo agoi 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.
- lacunary 6mo agoFlair Driven Development. What do you think about a project that only has 15 pieces of flair?
- shivasurya 6mo agoStar might be the weakest signal of project usefulness and also trust is eroding I no longer trust stars for security.
- Talderigi 6mo ago[dead]
- Cider9986 6mo agoI 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.
- panabee 6mo agoVCs 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.
- Silamoth 6mo agoGenuine 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?
- Applejinx 6mo agoNo 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.
- odyssey7 6mo agoThe fact that this article resonates, should I infer that the startup economy is picking back up?
- X1a0Ch3n 6mo ago[dead]
- NooneAtAll3 6mo agoI 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
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pbjerkeseth 6mo agoThis 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.
- winddude 6mo ago"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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- random__duck 6mo agoSo this is what real investigative journalism in the tech sector looks like ?
- abelanger 6mo ago> 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.
- crazyjudenstern 6mo agoI haven't seen that many stars since the Holocaust.
- marsulta 6mo agoAnyone 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.
- simultsop 6mo agoWe need our spokesperson to speak about this! https://www.youtube.com/@programmersarealsohuman5909 https://www.youtube.com/@programmersarealsohuman5909
- ffoster007 6mo agoSome projects I've encountered seem unremarkable, yet surprisingly, they have a lot of stars.
- baranul 5mo agoA 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.
- sigurfan 6mo agoIBM bought DataStax primarily based on Langflows fake stars. DataStax CEO shenanigans...
- Olshansky 6mo agoLiterally posted about this but w.r.t to agent-skills yesterday: https://olshansky.substack.com/p/why-every-developer-needs-their-own https://olshansky.substack.com/p/why-every-developer-needs-t... Need to move from skill downloads to skill usage.
- sixthDot 6mo agohttps://github.com/vlang/v https://github.com/vlang/v
- baranul 5mo agoWay 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 https://github.com/ziglang/zig [2]: https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language [3]: https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language/trends https://ossinsight.io/collections/programming-language/trend... [4]: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c https://github.com/c3lang/c3c [5]: https://github.com/zenc-lang/zenc https://github.com/zenc-lang/zenc
- AndyKelley 5mo agoyour links don't back up your claims
- tesders 6mo ago[dead]
- aanet 6mo agoIf 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
- cuttothechase 6mo agoAs 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!
- izucken 6mo agoI should stop starring as a joke or as a bookmark...
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoMy 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 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.
- halamadrid 6mo agoBuying 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.
- swordsith 6mo agoVery obviously AI written, could tell by the end of the first sentence. Could've been a interesting read.. if you wrote it.
- evilsocket 6mo agoIt does not make the numbers, research and original research on top of which this is based, wrong :D
- swordsith 5mo agoidc its obviously Ai, your algo is wrong.
- _blk 6mo agoI'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 :)
- jiveturkey 6mo ago6 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.
- fr3on 6mo ago[flagged]
- LtWorf 6mo agoI 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.
- neehao 6mo agosee this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07919 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07919
- giannicmptr1000 6mo agohacker news should get rid of the upvotes, i thought that was the lamest part of the site that and the openai smooching
- frabonacci 6mo agowhat'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
- linzhangrun 6mo ago[dead]
- ningshiqi 6mo agoBuilt 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. https://starforensic.pro https://starforensic.pro
- ios1 5mo agohi