Posted by Liriel 4 days ago
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?
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.
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.
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?
We should do a hall of shame!
> 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.
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.
My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.
Organic users still have to consider it, but then they might not dismiss it outright because it has five stars or something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.