> we track our own GitHub star count along with that of other projects. So when we spotted some new open-source projects suddenly racking up hundreds of stars a week, we were impressed. In some cases, it looked a bit too good to be true, and the patterns seemed off
If their competitor has fake-looking star counts, I'd expect them to be the ones best equipped and most likely to suspect it.
This shows that anyone who markets FOSS projects with statements like "It has 12k stars on GitHub!" is either clueless about this kind of manipulation, or complicit in it. I have previously expressed skepticism about how useful stars are in the first place, but this is pretty clear evidence that they are basically minor ads that can be bought and sold on the marketplace.
As such, I will be examining open source projects that emphasize their star count in marketing a lot more closely from now on.
The real revelation here is that people take this kind of Imaginary Internet Points seriously enough that there's a tool to algorithmically assess the quality of a project's GitHub stars[0].
Like: what?
Stars are basically the laziest possible way of doing anything with a repo besides looking at it. What possible signal of any value could anyone possibly hope to discern from a repo's star count? And yet not only is there an economy of counterfeit stars (flares? c.f. pieces of flair, which are equally meaningless. Also, the budget ones are ephemeral, just like a road flare), there are people who care so much about stars and flares that there's a whole 'nother economy behind discerning which are which.
While I was suspecting something like this is taking place, it's quite sad to actually have solid evidence.
I was actually doing my own kind-of research in hopes of starting an open-source-focused start-up. While I know stars aren't the definitive indicator of the project quality or popularity, it certainly helps build a good image, as it's one of the easiest public stats potential users can track. Also, unless gained in nefarious manners, like described in the post, they also roughly align with the project's current stage.
I was exploring how other start-up projects gain their stars, mainly by aligning the visible bumps in their star count to various events related to the project.
Pretty much all official start-up or seed funding announcements I've seen happened in the range of 300~3000 stars, mostly at ~1000. The main drivers behind the star bumps of the projects were e.g. viral HN or Reddit posts, PH launch, or getting to GitHub Trending.
For some projects however, I couldn't find any events related to the stars increases which, considering this post, makes the possibility of them being bought higher than 0.
I don't think GitHub stars a reliable indicator of community size. They are often an indicator of how much effort someone has put into promoting the library on social media. Some people have starred thousands of repos that they only ever looked at once when they saw it on the front page of HN (I know, because I'm one of them).
A quick read of the source, tests, documentation, issues etc provide better information than counting stars in my experience.
How interesting. I think my biggest surprise from this is that Github actually looks for illegitimate stars. I wonder how that affects the repos with a huge amount of stars, like if they get culled often dropping the repos to a huge degree. I'd imagine a lot of these bots follow big projects to look more authentic.
GitHub is fully aware of these, would they consider something like a "confirmed" star count that subtracts the suspicious/fake number? Or is that too much of a slippery slope.
Wow I've never seen so many fake accounts on a HN post before. So then is it fair to say the Github stars for this project could also perhaps be artificially inflated? This month they started to go exponential: https://github.com/langgenius/dify?tab=readme-ov-file#star-h...
Github stars are a strikingly fickle metric. There doesn't really seem to be any correlation between # of stars and quality of project or how novel the idea is or similar. It's just a number, basically
I do not trust star count on Github at all, and I see no reason why I would? There are much better ways of seeing quality, you can look at the code, you can judge from what you hear at conferences and read online. When I see some org brag about Star count, I assume its just a weird marketing gimmick they are using. How many stars does Linux have (or the github clone rather)? React? I have no idea, probably many but I know they are solid projects regardless of looking at their star number.
GitHub stars are a popularity contest that has little correlation with the quality of your work. You get them when lots of people happen to look at your GitHub profile, for one reason or another. I recently discovered this when a project of mine [1] that had been on GitHub for six months got starred by a prominent open source developer at my company. Within the next week, 50 random people came through and starred the same project. It's not my best code, it's not complicated, and I doubt most of those people ever tried it. Instead, they starred it because they're the kind of people who happen to star a lot of things, and they saw it from somewhere else.
I'm always happy to get a kudos on GitHub. But those of us who don't play the game of promoting our own code on social media, or who have code we can't post on GitHub, would be at a significant disadvantage in a hiring process based on that metric.
github stars are a pretty crappy measure of anything. maybe for "people who've seen it and thought it looked vaguely interesting" (which something like V that makes a big splash with gigantic promises easily hits), but even that is vague, given how differently people use them. (People making a big deal out of them is a pretty good negative signal though)
From the giving standpoint, people read too much into the meaning of individuals starring repos. Employee for $CORP starring a repo just means that person felt compelled to star the repo, and has no broader implication that $CORP is using the project in question. Maintainers behind the repo sometimes construe that as a company endorsement, and in some cases use that as the basis for including logos in marketing material.
From the interpretation side, the statistic itself is subject to gamification. There used to be a website where you could essentially "buy stars", ultimately calling into question any sort of usage-based signaling.
From the maintainer side, GitHub stars are basically the equivalent of likes and retweets. There's no magical bank that we can go to exchange GitHub stars for dollars. While it is certainly exciting to see major thresholds crossed, the prospect of receiving extra stars does not usually compel people to put more time and energy into a project.
(full disclosure: our largest open source project https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/ has over 10K stars and the perceived popularity certainly is surprising for a seemingly niche project)
" I don't see how the number of stars is anything other than a vanity metric"
No, you can't say like that. It actually describes the usefulness and impact of github project. Who will come, check out the repo and star without estimating its usefulness, issues count, contributor count or code commit frequency and its impact on public websites and usefulness for the web? all these factors project that the project is having some "useful" rather than some sort of "vanity".
May I ask why you find it fishy? I’m one of the maintainer of an Open source project with ~2000 stars and 50 issues [1] (some bugs, some questions and a lot of enhancement proposal). I don’t think there is anything strange in these kinds of numbers.
> we track our own GitHub star count along with that of other projects. So when we spotted some new open-source projects suddenly racking up hundreds of stars a week, we were impressed. In some cases, it looked a bit too good to be true, and the patterns seemed off
If their competitor has fake-looking star counts, I'd expect them to be the ones best equipped and most likely to suspect it.
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