GitHub's fake star economy

Perceived Problems with GitHub Stars

• Many commenters see stars as a very weak signal: costless to give, easily faked, and not tied to real usage or quality.
• Goodhart’s law is cited repeatedly: once stars became a target for VCs, employers, and marketing, they stopped being a good measure.
• Several describe firsthand evidence of repos with huge star counts but almost no issues, PRs, forks, or meaningful commits.
• Some now treat a very high star count (especially for AI/agent projects) as a negative signal for hype.

Why VCs and Others Still Use Them

• Stars are simple, numeric, and legible to non-technical investors and committees; they help justify decisions.
• For early-stage OSS startups, there often aren’t better easy numbers; stars, downloads, and social buzz become proxies for “traction.”
• Some argue sophisticated funds mostly discount stars now and do deep diligence; others say the broader ecosystem and tooling (indexes, scrapers) still over-index on them.

Alternative Signals and Heuristics

• Common replacement heuristics:
  • Recent commit activity, project age, and commit history.
  • Issue volume, quality, and maintainer responsiveness.
  • Number and identity of contributors; “bus factor.”
  • Release cadence, changelogs, dependency hygiene, and API elegance.
  • Forks and who stars/forks the repo, not just how many.
• Several suggest graph-based or reputation-weighted metrics (PageRank/“peoplerank”-style, trusted contributor sets, network centrality).
• Others emphasize the only truly reliable metric: “does it solve my problem, and are maintainers responsive?”

Gaming, Detection, and Countermeasures

• Star-buying markets, hackathons that require starring, and astroturf campaigns are reported.
• Some propose fork-to-star ratios and zero-follower/zero-repo stargazer rates as heuristics for fake stars; others argue these signals are noisy or flawed.
• With LLMs, commenters expect next-round attacks: fake issues, PRs, and “activity” will be easy to mass-generate.
• Several believe GitHub could crack down using internal signals but has little incentive, given its social-network-like incentives.

Broader Reflections

• Many note that every popularity metric (downloads, followers, reviews, traffic) is now routinely gamed; an entire industry sells fake “signal.”
• Some still defend stars as “better than nothing” for rough discovery, especially at extremes (0 vs thousands).
• Others are moving to treating stars purely as personal bookmarks and ignoring counts entirely.