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Can 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 quarte

Can 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Owners 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 …
  - lordgrenville 6mo ago
    More to the point, in the US losing teams get rewarded in the form of draft picks, which sometimes creates perverse incentives. This doesn't exist in European football. (Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about American sports.)
    - The_Blade 6mo ago
      just wait until you get to the subject of tanking in the NBA is there a tech equivalent? like you do a crappy job with your series A on purpose which helps you get a better series B. although there is the notion of a big round of layoffs to secure further investment
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Draft picks + salary caps and the various workarounds involved there make it more of a financier's dream than a competitive sport.
  - xnorswap 6mo ago
    Right, I forgot you guys have "The Draft", so failing is an advantage, doubly so if you can sell your draft picks, because then you can keep losing by having sold away the mechanism for getting you competitive again. I am so glad the proposed "European super league" was killed off so hard, so that we don't get a franchise model, it produces so many adverse incentives.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      The thing I like about EU football is that if your team sucks arse through a garden hose too long, your entire team gets demoted to a lower league. That would put a fire under some asses!
      - rbonvall 6mo ago
        Note that it's not a European thing. It's how most football leagues around the world work.
- The_Blade 6mo ago
  Browns fan in. We're owned by a criminal (truck stop-related fraud) who was convinced by a homeless person to draft Johnny Manziel. trust me, we want to put him (and Paul Dolan) into graveyard orbit. but it's not like Vercel where you can just go use AWS or Cloudflare or whatever; and it's not like switching makes you weak, you stand by your team through the hard times! plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watching football? hahahahahaha
  - mkovach 6mo ago
    Hey, you can say that the Dolans should/could spend more, but I don't think you really want an owner who has solidified the team in Cleveland, has the fourth-best record in baseball over the past 10 years, and has seven recent playoff appearances in the graveyard. The Haslams? Yeah, they should really sell the team, but I figure in about 10-15 years, they'll move it out of Cleveland.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
    > plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watching football? hahahahahaha Former Seahawks fan here, it's easier than you think. (It wasn't their record, I stuck with them through the 90s after all, it was realizing what CTE meant for the players).
    - gopher_space 6mo ago
      As far as I could tell everyone got a Sounders jersey in the mail as part of the Sonics move.
- mkovach 6mo ago
  The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks. Hugh Jackson was extremely good at losing, so he stayed. The owner of the Cleveland Browns uses the team to generate more revenue. For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue. There is no strong financial incentive to win in the NFL, aside from the owner's ego. The Browns' owner's ego is driven by money, and the result shows on the field.
  - datsci_est_2015 6mo ago
    > For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue. Like an allegory for performative capitalism in America. Profit and quality completely decoupled in the wake of market capture (rent seeking).
  - triceratops 6mo ago
    > The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks But if they don't care about winning, why bother getting good draft picks?
    - xnorswap 6mo ago
      From doing more research about this, it seems they don't want to use the good draft picks, but to sell them on to teams that do want to win. The draft pick is itself a commodity that can be traded*, so by losing they get a premium commodity, that they can sell on, and by selling their picks they ensure that they continue to lose to get the valuable commodity. They even lobbied to tweak rules around selling draft picks: https://www.reuters.com/sports/browns-ask-nfl-allow-draft-pick-trades-up-5-years-out--flm-2026-03-19/ https://www.reuters.com/sports/browns-ask-nfl-allow-draft-pi... * This seems completely absurd to me, but perhaps there would just be backroom deals otherwise, and having it sanctioned brings it into the light?
- mauvehaus 6mo ago
  In truth, I don't follow sports much, but I'm really not sure either. I do find the model European Football (soccer) using promotion and relegation to be much more interesting, both from the standpoint of culling out perennially hopeless teams from top-tier competition, and for having a place for people to play who aren't absolute superstars.
- rhplus 6mo ago
  Yeah, exactly. The NFL is a closed system franchise. The same 32 teams play every season whether they win or lose. No team risks relegation to a lower revenue league. Every team gets a roughly equal share of the franchise revenue regardless of performance.
- bena 6mo ago
  If Jackson signed a three-year contract, then the Browns would be paying him for three years regardless. Even if they fired him. Then he could go work for another team and get paid by both teams. Regardless, a coach is given some leeway their first season. They were coming off a 3-13 season, so 1-15 isn't that much of a drop. Jackson could make the case that he needed another season to build his ideal roster. Then after going 0-16, they were on track to get Mayfield. He could have made the case that if he can't win with Mayfield, then maybe he just can't win. Then he didn't win with Mayfield.
bombcar 6mo ago
This has happened in multiple industries a number of times - publishers discover that people with large twitter followings sell a decent number of books, so they start selecting new authors who only have large twitter followings, and discover is was correlation and not causation. And once it gets out that it’s a selection criteria it gets gamed to hell and back.
- mauvehaus 6mo ago
  I appreciate this, but the stakes have to be a lot lower bringing a book to market than making a $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 seed investment. I'd sort of expect that when you're dealing with sums of money that size there would be some grown-ups in the room.
- consp 6mo ago
  You just stated Goodharts law in effect.* [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- ngruhn 6mo ago
  Also known as Goodharts law.
AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
When I took over MLAgents at the end of 2021, before Unity fully shit themselves after the insane Weta acquisition, the main metric they were using to promote the project internally were github stars Yes actually Needless to say they didn’t like when I said this was a worthless metric and we needed to be using something like “working policies” or “time saved training”
- jordemort 6mo ago
  should have bought a few thousand stars on the internet and then taken the promotion to director
  - AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
    I was already a director and didn’t need the promotion I just wanted to build a good product but unfortunately good products are not relevant
- sidewndr46 6mo ago
  For those of us that don't understand what was so insane about the Weta acquisition?
  - AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
    It never made sense. Weta tools don’t work with Unity at all There were no complementary workflows or infrastructure or anything. It was explicitly a move to try to counter epic’s positioning and internally it was very obviously a JR versus Tim pissing contest (and JR was the only one in the contest because Tim didn’t give a fuck about Unity)
mkovach 6mo ago
> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers I believe that is how they made the final decision on Watson over Mayfield. Oh, wait, I don't think anything can explain that decision. Also from Cleveland. Go Guardians! Go Cavs!
kibwen 6mo ago
[flagged]
- jordanb 6mo ago
  Listening to All In is a real eye opening experience. Especially when they have guests on and they're exactly like the regulars.
  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - bix6 6mo ago
    I have zero respect for All In. It’s a shame people pay those guys any mind.
    - indymike 6mo ago
      An echo in the sounding chamber? Say it isn't so...
  - next_xibalba 6mo ago
    I actually think this take is wrong... but the moment Travis Kalanick was a guest and claimed that he was on the verge of discovering new physics with the aid of ChatGPT was an eye opening moment.
    - HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago
      "new-to-me" physics
      - jordanb 6mo ago
        Not even that it was just a bunch of AI-psychosis nonsense: https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai
- cmrdporcupine 6mo ago
sidewndr46 6mo ago
Hiring a QB based off instagram followers isn't even that unrealistic. If you can put together a team to win the Superbowl, sure do it! If not, just get together a team that people enjoy following and watching. Much of that would be putting athletes on the field that people engage with.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  I agree! Maybe the Browns have never played a Superbowl, but I would imagine they are still making a profit. Different goal.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
neom 6mo ago
As far as I recall it stared in 2014 or so, yes metrics could/were still gamed, but there was still a belief in VC that OSS projects could turn into Red Hats. First I heard of it was when a VC told me they were "looking for the next docker" and mentioned something about Rancher OS and how quickly it's stars/follows were growing. In VC you tend to have conviction builders, and conviction buyers. I suppose what happened was some conviction builders used growth of a project on gh as part of a leading indicator (valid or otherwise), and conviction buyers picked up on that as a method.
Aurornis 6mo ago
Social proof has always been a factor in investments. Not the only factor, but seeing signs of popularity has always been an input to investment decisions. The entire game of startup investing is to identify breakout companies early. Social proof (when valid, not faked) of interest is one of the strongest signals of product market fit. If a product has a lot of attention (users, headlines, stars, downloads, DAU) that’s a signal that it could also have a lot of customers some day. This is also why all of those metrics are targets for manipulation. > This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have Major sports team are about engaging fans. If a promising recruit had a huge social media presence then that could be a contributing factor toward trying to recruit that player. This is actually easier to understand if you look at the inverse: Some times there are players with amazing stats but who have a cloud of controversy following them. Teams will skip over these problematic players despite their performance because having popular and engaging players is important for teams but having anti-popular players will drive away fans.
esseph 6mo ago
> Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? I have personally seen several company CEOs (that were billionaires!) do this in different ways. Sometimes hiring people because of it.
strangescript 6mo ago
Same reason why two companies have the same idea, one goes viral and one doesn't. Public opinion matters even if its illogical at times.
ertgbnm 6mo ago
Instagram follows is not a good way to hire football players but it's probably a good way to hire instagram influencers. The football analogy is a little unfair because VCs are investing in more than just a company's ability to "play football" they are investing in the brand, the marketing, and the vision. GitHub stars are at least an indication of a startup having a promising brand or some ability to market themselves. Nevertheless, VCs are in fact pretty dumb sometimes and it'd be stupid to invest soley based on stars.
ramesh31 6mo ago
>Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? Github stars used to really mean something. Having 1k+ was considered a stable, mature library being used in prod by thousands of people. At 10k+ you were a top level open source project. Now they've been gamed by the dead internet just like everything else, and it's depressing as hell.
jcalx 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 like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that Not quite the same, but the New York Jets (one of the few NFL teams that can match the dysfunction of the Browns — they have the longest active playoff drought in big 4 North American sports) passed on a few successful players because the owner, Woody Johnson, reportedly didn't like their Madden (video game) ratings [0]: > A few weeks later, Douglas and his Broncos counterpart, George Paton, were deep in negotiations for a trade that would have sent Jeudy to the Jets and given future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers another potential playmaker. The Broncos felt a deal was near. Then, abruptly, it all fell apart. In Denver’s executive offices, they couldn’t believe the reason why. > Douglas told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources. The Broncos ultimately traded the receiver to the Cleveland Browns. Last Sunday, Jeudy crossed the 1,000-yard receiving mark for the first time in his career. ... > Johnson’s reference to Jeudy’s “Madden” rating was, to some in the Jets’ organization, a sign of Brick and Jack’s influence. Another example came when Johnson pushed back on signing free-agent guard John Simpson due to a lackluster “awareness” rating in Madden. The Jets signed Simpson anyway, and he has had a solid season: Pro Football Focus currently has him graded as the eighth-best guard in the NFL. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6005172/2024/12/19/woody-johnson-jets-madden-sons/ https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6005172/2024/12/19/woody-jo...
jazzypants 6mo ago
It's strange that I don't even get defensive about people picking on the Browns anymore. Weirdly, them giving a serial rapist over $200,000,000 was actually good for my mental health long-term. After 30 years of tying myself in knots trying to explain away their idiocy, I don't have to be weighed down by their terrible decisions anymore.
4er_transform 6mo ago
No VC makes an investment off the star count. It’s a signal to identify opportunities in the noise. Once surfaced, there’s other signals to filter if an initial conversation is even worth it. Assuming everyone else is just stupid and it’s all luck is a good way to hold yourself back from your potential.
arjie 6mo ago
Because the entire point is to be early to something here. If you wait for profitability, the guy is already funded. So you have to use proxies, and the proxies will be imperfect, but you don't have to be perfect. You just need some degree of performance. Stars are (were) an early indicator of community interest and predictably became goodharted when this became known. But I think it's been since 2022 since anyone seriously used stars for VC targeting so this is sort of old hat. It's a bit like the old article about evaluating software companies on whether they have version control or not. Everyone has version control now.
next_xibalba 6mo ago
> Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? It's purely incentives. Heavy competition for early signal identification has pushed them to crappier and crappier indicators.
zby 6mo ago
How do you check if a github repo is 'good'?
copperroof 6mo ago
Vcs are some of the dumbest people I have ever interacted with. Full stop no exceptions. They are luck, confirmation bias and survivor bias weaponized.
ninjahawk1 6mo ago
$1M-$10M is basically nothing for the big companies investing, they can literally mark it off as costs, and if one of them so happens to actually succeed they make it all back plus some. It’s not that they’re necessarily careless, it’s just that the bigger the net the more fish you catch. And when you own both all the fishing boats and all the nets…might as well cast wide.
boondongle 6mo ago
Almost all industries have divested themselves from the thing thing they supposedly had expertise in towards exploiting crowdsourced alternatives and then pocketing the extra money. Record labels did this with soundcloud or only picking up people who already had a following. Movies have done this repeatedly with adaptation (due respect to people who like their books remade faithfully, there's a reason the 70's/80's were that decade and it basically stopped once Comics/LotR arrived). A24 represents a disruption, not a normal studio. Books did this with webnovels or paying dirt cheap and making the Author market. What people tend to forget is they're just resource gatekeepers. They could just choose to invest in offices with cats because an office with cats popped massively one time and you can't say they're wrong, because there's no alternative funding you can get to A/B test with. In theory there are different firms - but they often went to the same schools, same peer group, same fraternity/sororities, and once they're in the wild they all know each other. It's not a different behavior if it's VC or if it's Nashville. The real question is how long before either governmental-busting or someone notices the lack of care with money and shops alternatives. In theory this is also partially why American firms face international risk - lacking people respecting their laziness, someone can break their model. That said - I'm not saying they're not smart - just that often there's a tendency to delude that shortcuts taken represent a "good job" rather than "no one can really say we're doing it poorly".
calebkaiser 6mo ago
I've worked on two open source infrastructure projects that raised money now, and am friends with people involved in many more. I'd put a couple of asterisks next to the claims in this article: - VCs definitely cared about our Stars, especially in early stages, but not as our primary metric. I suppose Stars might be the primary metric if they're truly off the charts, but usually they're just one of many social proof signals an investor might look at. - Investors, especially at the earliest stages, are quite a varied bunch. Some were diligent about looking at who was leaving Stars on the repo (i.e. are these accounts fake/do they belong to potential future customers). Some less so. This is true for basically every metric (see: startups that grossly misreport ARR) - Fake GitHub stars were a thing way before 2022. I'd have to look in more detail at the methodology here, but I'd question any analysis that finds that paying for GitHub Stars (or any social following kind of metric) is a strictly post-2022 thing. Any metric that can be construed as social proof will immediately have its own grifter economy. Investors know this and (mostly) do their diligence. Finally, showing numbers is hard for an early stage open source startup. At later stages, you should be able to show an actual business with typical metrics, but at the seed stage you often just have a repo and a website. Your goal is just to get a lot of people using your software. You can add telemetry to track that, but that's a thorny decision. GitHub Stars aren't a terrible proxy for popularity, provided that you audit the quality of the following. A project with a lot of organic stars and forks is, at the very least, a project that a lot of people are familiar with. I'm not saying that GitHub Stars aren't wildly overvalued or gamed, but contextualized properly, they're a reasonable metric to consider, particularly at earlier stages. Most investors aren't just throwing millions at random repositories with 20k Stars from obviously spam accounts.
jt2190 6mo ago
> Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial.
jt2190 6mo ago
> … VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? The only claim here is that there’s a report that tracks GitHub star growth that is that is presumably read by VCs: >> Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial. Again, the claim here is that the report is “influential”. Maybe?
pmichaud 6mo ago
I think it's probably a little bit about Goodhart? At some point soon after stars were widely in use but prior to them being connected to any particular incentive I bet they were actually a great signal of... something. But then once someone started using the signal to give attention or dollars, the signal was compromised.
meager_wikis 6mo ago
And just like with VC's, that one draft pick does eventually lead to a super bowl win, all the Johnny Manziel picks will be forgiven
riazrizvi 6mo ago
VCs are middlemen. It's not their money. As long as they can find a narrative to raise money, make a commission and do damage control on their reputation after the fallout, then their side pieces will never want for nothing.
comprev 6mo ago
These days many DJs are booked on their social media following not their skills or musical knowledge. The market is completely flooded and promotors cannot practically sift through the sheer volume of mixes published online -- so they go by Internet points instead.
tombert 6mo ago
I've gotten recruiters reach out for jobs because of my fairly high Hacker News karma. This isn't speculation on my end, they actually told me that. I agree it's idiotic; I'm quite confident that it wouldn't be that hard to cheat this system, and even if there absolutely no way to cheat the system, it's not like Hacker News points translate to smartness; my most upvoted posts have basically nothing to do with software engineering.
jmyeet 6mo ago
I agree with you but the funny thing about this comment is that fake Internet points is how decisions are made in many areas, including casting for TV shows and movies. If you want to make it as an actor today, you need a social media following [1]. It is directly relevant to you getting cast. It also helps you connect with other actors, with producers and directors, etc. Thing is, this isn't new. before social media, your influence was measured in "tear sheets" [2], basically any published story that you're in. This could be something as simple as going to Cannes or Sundance or even just to the hottest club. Sports also uses a points system (kind of) but it's meant to reflect ability. Take the NFL, for example. Going from high school to college and college to the NFL, you will have stats relevant to whatever position(s) you play. For a QB it's things like interceptions, passing years, running yards, completed throw percentages, etc. You then have the NFL Combine [3]. This is an intensive camp where certain metrics are taken like how much you can lift, 40 yard dash, etc. All of this tries to make it a science, or at least quantitative. But what I find funny is that despite all this work, it can still fail spectacularly. Like, being the #1 draft pick for the NFL is kind of a curse [4]. And then there's Tom Brady. For people unfamiliar with American sportsball, Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback in the game's history, having 7 Superbowl rings. Thing is, he was a 6th round draft pick in the 2000 NFL draft. For anyone not familiar with what that means, 6th (and especially 7th) round draft picks are like the bottom of the barrel. You're not expected to take a starting position. You may not even play unless 1-2 people get injured. Nobody expects you to be a great. [1]: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/social-media-actor-need-3993/ https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/social-media-acto... [2]: https://avenueagency.wordpress.com/tag/tear-sheet https://avenueagency.wordpress.com/tag/tear-sheet [3]: https://www.nfl.com/combine https://www.nfl.com/combine [4]: https://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/01/13/sportscasting-excerpt https://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/01/13/sportscasting-exce...

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 ago

I 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 ago
Owners 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 …
- lordgrenville 6mo ago
  More to the point, in the US losing teams get rewarded in the form of draft picks, which sometimes creates perverse incentives. This doesn't exist in European football. (Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about American sports.)
  - The_Blade 6mo ago
    just wait until you get to the subject of tanking in the NBA is there a tech equivalent? like you do a crappy job with your series A on purpose which helps you get a better series B. although there is the notion of a big round of layoffs to secure further investment
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Draft picks + salary caps and the various workarounds involved there make it more of a financier's dream than a competitive sport.
- xnorswap 6mo ago
  Right, I forgot you guys have "The Draft", so failing is an advantage, doubly so if you can sell your draft picks, because then you can keep losing by having sold away the mechanism for getting you competitive again. I am so glad the proposed "European super league" was killed off so hard, so that we don't get a franchise model, it produces so many adverse incentives.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    The thing I like about EU football is that if your team sucks arse through a garden hose too long, your entire team gets demoted to a lower league. That would put a fire under some asses!
    - rbonvall 6mo ago
      Note that it's not a European thing. It's how most football leagues around the world work.
The_Blade 6mo ago
Browns fan in. We're owned by a criminal (truck stop-related fraud) who was convinced by a homeless person to draft Johnny Manziel. trust me, we want to put him (and Paul Dolan) into graveyard orbit. but it's not like Vercel where you can just go use AWS or Cloudflare or whatever; and it's not like switching makes you weak, you stand by your team through the hard times! plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watching football? hahahahahaha
- mkovach 6mo ago
  Hey, you can say that the Dolans should/could spend more, but I don't think you really want an owner who has solidified the team in Cleveland, has the fourth-best record in baseball over the past 10 years, and has seven recent playoff appearances in the graveyard. The Haslams? Yeah, they should really sell the team, but I figure in about 10-15 years, they'll move it out of Cleveland.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago
  > plus, what is an NFL fan going to do, stop watching football? hahahahahaha Former Seahawks fan here, it's easier than you think. (It wasn't their record, I stuck with them through the 90s after all, it was realizing what CTE meant for the players).
  - gopher_space 6mo ago
    As far as I could tell everyone got a Sounders jersey in the mail as part of the Sonics move.
mkovach 6mo ago
The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks. Hugh Jackson was extremely good at losing, so he stayed. The owner of the Cleveland Browns uses the team to generate more revenue. For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue. There is no strong financial incentive to win in the NFL, aside from the owner's ego. The Browns' owner's ego is driven by money, and the result shows on the field.
- datsci_est_2015 6mo ago
  > For NFL teams, performance has little to do with their value or ability to generate additional revenue. Like an allegory for performative capitalism in America. Profit and quality completely decoupled in the wake of market capture (rent seeking).
- triceratops 6mo ago
  > The prevailing narrative here is that the team was actively looking to lose to acquire draft picks But if they don't care about winning, why bother getting good draft picks?
  - xnorswap 6mo ago
    From doing more research about this, it seems they don't want to use the good draft picks, but to sell them on to teams that do want to win. The draft pick is itself a commodity that can be traded*, so by losing they get a premium commodity, that they can sell on, and by selling their picks they ensure that they continue to lose to get the valuable commodity. They even lobbied to tweak rules around selling draft picks: https://www.reuters.com/sports/browns-ask-nfl-allow-draft-pick-trades-up-5-years-out--flm-2026-03-19/ https://www.reuters.com/sports/browns-ask-nfl-allow-draft-pi... * This seems completely absurd to me, but perhaps there would just be backroom deals otherwise, and having it sanctioned brings it into the light?
mauvehaus 6mo ago
In truth, I don't follow sports much, but I'm really not sure either. I do find the model European Football (soccer) using promotion and relegation to be much more interesting, both from the standpoint of culling out perennially hopeless teams from top-tier competition, and for having a place for people to play who aren't absolute superstars.
rhplus 6mo ago
Yeah, exactly. The NFL is a closed system franchise. The same 32 teams play every season whether they win or lose. No team risks relegation to a lower revenue league. Every team gets a roughly equal share of the franchise revenue regardless of performance.
bena 6mo ago
If Jackson signed a three-year contract, then the Browns would be paying him for three years regardless. Even if they fired him. Then he could go work for another team and get paid by both teams. Regardless, a coach is given some leeway their first season. They were coming off a 3-13 season, so 1-15 isn't that much of a drop. Jackson could make the case that he needed another season to build his ideal roster. Then after going 0-16, they were on track to get Mayfield. He could have made the case that if he can't win with Mayfield, then maybe he just can't win. Then he didn't win with Mayfield.

bombcar 6mo ago

This has happened in multiple industries a number of times - publishers discover that people with large twitter followings sell a decent number of books, so they start selecting new authors who only have large twitter followings, and discover is was correlation and not causation. And once it gets out that it’s a selection criteria it gets gamed to hell and back.

mauvehaus 6mo ago
I appreciate this, but the stakes have to be a lot lower bringing a book to market than making a $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 seed investment. I'd sort of expect that when you're dealing with sums of money that size there would be some grown-ups in the room.
consp 6mo ago
You just stated Goodharts law in effect.* [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
ngruhn 6mo ago
Also known as Goodharts law.

AndrewKemendo 6mo ago

When I took over MLAgents at the end of 2021, before Unity fully shit themselves after the insane Weta acquisition, the main metric they were using to promote the project internally were github stars Yes actually Needless to say they didn’t like when I said this was a worthless metric and we needed to be using something like “working policies” or “time saved training”

jordemort 6mo ago
should have bought a few thousand stars on the internet and then taken the promotion to director
- AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
  I was already a director and didn’t need the promotion I just wanted to build a good product but unfortunately good products are not relevant
sidewndr46 6mo ago
For those of us that don't understand what was so insane about the Weta acquisition?
- AndrewKemendo 6mo ago
  It never made sense. Weta tools don’t work with Unity at all There were no complementary workflows or infrastructure or anything. It was explicitly a move to try to counter epic’s positioning and internally it was very obviously a JR versus Tim pissing contest (and JR was the only one in the contest because Tim didn’t give a fuck about Unity)

mkovach 6mo ago

> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers I believe that is how they made the final decision on Watson over Mayfield. Oh, wait, I don't think anything can explain that decision. Also from Cleveland. Go Guardians! Go Cavs!

kibwen 6mo ago

[flagged]

jordanb 6mo ago
Listening to All In is a real eye opening experience. Especially when they have guests on and they're exactly like the regulars.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- bix6 6mo ago
  I have zero respect for All In. It’s a shame people pay those guys any mind.
  - indymike 6mo ago
    An echo in the sounding chamber? Say it isn't so...
- next_xibalba 6mo ago
  I actually think this take is wrong... but the moment Travis Kalanick was a guest and claimed that he was on the verge of discovering new physics with the aid of ChatGPT was an eye opening moment.
  - HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago
    "new-to-me" physics
    - jordanb 6mo ago
      Not even that it was just a bunch of AI-psychosis nonsense: https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai
cmrdporcupine 6mo ago

sidewndr46 6mo ago

Hiring a QB based off instagram followers isn't even that unrealistic. If you can put together a team to win the Superbowl, sure do it! If not, just get together a team that people enjoy following and watching. Much of that would be putting athletes on the field that people engage with.

bigfishrunning 6mo ago
I agree! Maybe the Browns have never played a Superbowl, but I would imagine they are still making a profit. Different goal.

deleted 6mo ago

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neom 6mo ago

As far as I recall it stared in 2014 or so, yes metrics could/were still gamed, but there was still a belief in VC that OSS projects could turn into Red Hats. First I heard of it was when a VC told me they were "looking for the next docker" and mentioned something about Rancher OS and how quickly it's stars/follows were growing. In VC you tend to have conviction builders, and conviction buyers. I suppose what happened was some conviction builders used growth of a project on gh as part of a leading indicator (valid or otherwise), and conviction buyers picked up on that as a method.

Aurornis 6mo ago

Social proof has always been a factor in investments. Not the only factor, but seeing signs of popularity has always been an input to investment decisions. The entire game of startup investing is to identify breakout companies early. Social proof (when valid, not faked) of interest is one of the strongest signals of product market fit. If a product has a lot of attention (users, headlines, stars, downloads, DAU) that’s a signal that it could also have a lot of customers some day. This is also why all of those metrics are targets for manipulation. > This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have Major sports team are about engaging fans. If a promising recruit had a huge social media presence then that could be a contributing factor toward trying to recruit that player. This is actually easier to understand if you look at the inverse: Some times there are players with amazing stats but who have a cloud of controversy following them. Teams will skip over these problematic players despite their performance because having popular and engaging players is important for teams but having anti-popular players will drive away fans.

esseph 6mo ago

> Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? I have personally seen several company CEOs (that were billionaires!) do this in different ways. Sometimes hiring people because of it.

strangescript 6mo ago

Same reason why two companies have the same idea, one goes viral and one doesn't. Public opinion matters even if its illogical at times.

ertgbnm 6mo ago

Instagram follows is not a good way to hire football players but it's probably a good way to hire instagram influencers. The football analogy is a little unfair because VCs are investing in more than just a company's ability to "play football" they are investing in the brand, the marketing, and the vision. GitHub stars are at least an indication of a startup having a promising brand or some ability to market themselves. Nevertheless, VCs are in fact pretty dumb sometimes and it'd be stupid to invest soley based on stars.

ramesh31 6mo ago

>Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? Github stars used to really mean something. Having 1k+ was considered a stable, mature library being used in prod by thousands of people. At 10k+ you were a top level open source project. Now they've been gamed by the dead internet just like everything else, and it's depressing as hell.

jcalx 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 like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that Not quite the same, but the New York Jets (one of the few NFL teams that can match the dysfunction of the Browns — they have the longest active playoff drought in big 4 North American sports) passed on a few successful players because the owner, Woody Johnson, reportedly didn't like their Madden (video game) ratings [0]: > A few weeks later, Douglas and his Broncos counterpart, George Paton, were deep in negotiations for a trade that would have sent Jeudy to the Jets and given future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers another potential playmaker. The Broncos felt a deal was near. Then, abruptly, it all fell apart. In Denver’s executive offices, they couldn’t believe the reason why. > Douglas told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources. The Broncos ultimately traded the receiver to the Cleveland Browns. Last Sunday, Jeudy crossed the 1,000-yard receiving mark for the first time in his career. ... > Johnson’s reference to Jeudy’s “Madden” rating was, to some in the Jets’ organization, a sign of Brick and Jack’s influence. Another example came when Johnson pushed back on signing free-agent guard John Simpson due to a lackluster “awareness” rating in Madden. The Jets signed Simpson anyway, and he has had a solid season: Pro Football Focus currently has him graded as the eighth-best guard in the NFL. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6005172/2024/12/19/woody-johnson-jets-madden-sons/ https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6005172/2024/12/19/woody-jo...

jazzypants 6mo ago

It's strange that I don't even get defensive about people picking on the Browns anymore. Weirdly, them giving a serial rapist over $200,000,000 was actually good for my mental health long-term. After 30 years of tying myself in knots trying to explain away their idiocy, I don't have to be weighed down by their terrible decisions anymore.

4er_transform 6mo ago

No VC makes an investment off the star count. It’s a signal to identify opportunities in the noise. Once surfaced, there’s other signals to filter if an initial conversation is even worth it. Assuming everyone else is just stupid and it’s all luck is a good way to hold yourself back from your potential.

arjie 6mo ago

Because the entire point is to be early to something here. If you wait for profitability, the guy is already funded. So you have to use proxies, and the proxies will be imperfect, but you don't have to be perfect. You just need some degree of performance. Stars are (were) an early indicator of community interest and predictably became goodharted when this became known. But I think it's been since 2022 since anyone seriously used stars for VC targeting so this is sort of old hat. It's a bit like the old article about evaluating software companies on whether they have version control or not. Everyone has version control now.

next_xibalba 6mo ago

> Can anyone explain why on earth VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? It's purely incentives. Heavy competition for early signal identification has pushed them to crappier and crappier indicators.

zby 6mo ago

How do you check if a github repo is 'good'?

copperroof 6mo ago

Vcs are some of the dumbest people I have ever interacted with. Full stop no exceptions. They are luck, confirmation bias and survivor bias weaponized.

ninjahawk1 6mo ago

$1M-$10M is basically nothing for the big companies investing, they can literally mark it off as costs, and if one of them so happens to actually succeed they make it all back plus some. It’s not that they’re necessarily careless, it’s just that the bigger the net the more fish you catch. And when you own both all the fishing boats and all the nets…might as well cast wide.

boondongle 6mo ago

Almost all industries have divested themselves from the thing thing they supposedly had expertise in towards exploiting crowdsourced alternatives and then pocketing the extra money. Record labels did this with soundcloud or only picking up people who already had a following. Movies have done this repeatedly with adaptation (due respect to people who like their books remade faithfully, there's a reason the 70's/80's were that decade and it basically stopped once Comics/LotR arrived). A24 represents a disruption, not a normal studio. Books did this with webnovels or paying dirt cheap and making the Author market. What people tend to forget is they're just resource gatekeepers. They could just choose to invest in offices with cats because an office with cats popped massively one time and you can't say they're wrong, because there's no alternative funding you can get to A/B test with. In theory there are different firms - but they often went to the same schools, same peer group, same fraternity/sororities, and once they're in the wild they all know each other. It's not a different behavior if it's VC or if it's Nashville. The real question is how long before either governmental-busting or someone notices the lack of care with money and shops alternatives. In theory this is also partially why American firms face international risk - lacking people respecting their laziness, someone can break their model. That said - I'm not saying they're not smart - just that often there's a tendency to delude that shortcuts taken represent a "good job" rather than "no one can really say we're doing it poorly".

calebkaiser 6mo ago

I've worked on two open source infrastructure projects that raised money now, and am friends with people involved in many more. I'd put a couple of asterisks next to the claims in this article: - VCs definitely cared about our Stars, especially in early stages, but not as our primary metric. I suppose Stars might be the primary metric if they're truly off the charts, but usually they're just one of many social proof signals an investor might look at. - Investors, especially at the earliest stages, are quite a varied bunch. Some were diligent about looking at who was leaving Stars on the repo (i.e. are these accounts fake/do they belong to potential future customers). Some less so. This is true for basically every metric (see: startups that grossly misreport ARR) - Fake GitHub stars were a thing way before 2022. I'd have to look in more detail at the methodology here, but I'd question any analysis that finds that paying for GitHub Stars (or any social following kind of metric) is a strictly post-2022 thing. Any metric that can be construed as social proof will immediately have its own grifter economy. Investors know this and (mostly) do their diligence. Finally, showing numbers is hard for an early stage open source startup. At later stages, you should be able to show an actual business with typical metrics, but at the seed stage you often just have a repo and a website. Your goal is just to get a lot of people using your software. You can add telemetry to track that, but that's a thorny decision. GitHub Stars aren't a terrible proxy for popularity, provided that you audit the quality of the following. A project with a lot of organic stars and forks is, at the very least, a project that a lot of people are familiar with. I'm not saying that GitHub Stars aren't wildly overvalued or gamed, but contextualized properly, they're a reasonable metric to consider, particularly at earlier stages. Most investors aren't just throwing millions at random repositories with 20k Stars from obviously spam accounts.

jt2190 6mo ago

> Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial.

jt2190 6mo ago

> … VC's are making actual investment decisions based on imaginary internet points? The only claim here is that there’s a report that tracks GitHub star growth that is that is presumably read by VCs: >> Union Labs is the most consequential case. It was ranked #1 on Runa Capital's ROSS Index for Q2 2025 - a widely cited VC industry report identifying the "hottest open-source startups" - with 54.2x star growth and 74,300 stars. Our analysis found 32.7% zero-repo accounts, 52% zero-follower accounts, and a fork-to-star ratio of 0.052. The StarScout analysis flagged it with 47.4% suspected fake stars. An influential investment-sourcing report that VCs rely on was topped by a project with nearly half its stars suspected as artificial. Again, the claim here is that the report is “influential”. Maybe?

pmichaud 6mo ago

I think it's probably a little bit about Goodhart? At some point soon after stars were widely in use but prior to them being connected to any particular incentive I bet they were actually a great signal of... something. But then once someone started using the signal to give attention or dollars, the signal was compromised.

meager_wikis 6mo ago

And just like with VC's, that one draft pick does eventually lead to a super bowl win, all the Johnny Manziel picks will be forgiven

riazrizvi 6mo ago

VCs are middlemen. It's not their money. As long as they can find a narrative to raise money, make a commission and do damage control on their reputation after the fallout, then their side pieces will never want for nothing.

comprev 6mo ago

These days many DJs are booked on their social media following not their skills or musical knowledge. The market is completely flooded and promotors cannot practically sift through the sheer volume of mixes published online -- so they go by Internet points instead.

tombert 6mo ago

I've gotten recruiters reach out for jobs because of my fairly high Hacker News karma. This isn't speculation on my end, they actually told me that. I agree it's idiotic; I'm quite confident that it wouldn't be that hard to cheat this system, and even if there absolutely no way to cheat the system, it's not like Hacker News points translate to smartness; my most upvoted posts have basically nothing to do with software engineering.

jmyeet 6mo ago

I agree with you but the funny thing about this comment is that fake Internet points is how decisions are made in many areas, including casting for TV shows and movies. If you want to make it as an actor today, you need a social media following [1]. It is directly relevant to you getting cast. It also helps you connect with other actors, with producers and directors, etc. Thing is, this isn't new. before social media, your influence was measured in "tear sheets" [2], basically any published story that you're in. This could be something as simple as going to Cannes or Sundance or even just to the hottest club. Sports also uses a points system (kind of) but it's meant to reflect ability. Take the NFL, for example. Going from high school to college and college to the NFL, you will have stats relevant to whatever position(s) you play. For a QB it's things like interceptions, passing years, running yards, completed throw percentages, etc. You then have the NFL Combine [3]. This is an intensive camp where certain metrics are taken like how much you can lift, 40 yard dash, etc. All of this tries to make it a science, or at least quantitative. But what I find funny is that despite all this work, it can still fail spectacularly. Like, being the #1 draft pick for the NFL is kind of a curse [4]. And then there's Tom Brady. For people unfamiliar with American sportsball, Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback in the game's history, having 7 Superbowl rings. Thing is, he was a 6th round draft pick in the 2000 NFL draft. For anyone not familiar with what that means, 6th (and especially 7th) round draft picks are like the bottom of the barrel. You're not expected to take a starting position. You may not even play unless 1-2 people get injured. Nobody expects you to be a great. [1]: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/social-media-actor-need-3993/ https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/social-media-acto... [2]: https://avenueagency.wordpress.com/tag/tear-sheet https://avenueagency.wordpress.com/tag/tear-sheet [3]: https://www.nfl.com/combine https://www.nfl.com/combine [4]: https://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/01/13/sportscasting-excerpt https://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/01/13/sportscasting-exce...