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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
(Sometimes still is, but the agents garbage does not help)
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.
If the number of stars are in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that might correlate with a serious project. But that should be visible by real, costly activity such as issues, PRs, discussion and activity.
It is the meaning of having dozens or hundreds of stars that is undermined by the practice described at the linked post.
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.
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.
There are much better ways of finding those who have good taste.
Even 10 years ago most VCs we spoke to had wisened up and discarded Github stars as a vanity metric.
one VC told me, you'll get more funding and upvotes if u don't put "india" in your username.
Founders need the ability to get traction, so if a VC gets a pitch and the project's repo has 0 stars, that's a strong signal that this specific team is just not able to put themselves out there, or that what they're making doesn't resonate with anyone.
When I mentioned that a small feature I shared got 3k views when I just mentioned it on Reddit, then investors' ears perked right up and I bet you're thinking "I wonder what that is, I'd like to see that!" People like to see things that are popular.
By the way, congrats on 200 stars on your project, I think that is definitely a solid indicator of interest and quality, and I doubt investors would ignore it.
I think VCs just know that there are no reliable systems, so they go with whatever's used.
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13459 (2024/2025) - Six Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Spams, and Malware
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.
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.
Hype helps raise funds, of course, and sells, of course.
But it doesn't necessarily lead to long-term sustainability of investments.
In general, I’ve been dissatisfied with GitHub’s code search. It would be nice to see innovation here.
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?
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.
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?
Specifically if those avatars are cute animie girls.
I know you are half joking/not joking, but this is definitely a golden signal.
https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
Sounds useful.
I’ll star it and check it out later ;)
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.
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.
For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.
I am not successful at all with my current projects (admittedly am not trying to be nowadays), so feel free to dismiss this advice that predates a time before LLM driven development, but in the past, I have had decent success in forums interacting with those with a specific problem my project did address. Less in stars, more in actual exchange of helpful contributions.
My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
“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.
> 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.