Seen this firsthand, repos with hundreds of stars and zero meaningful commits or issues. In hardware/RTL projects it's less prominent.

This has unfortunately been going on for years at this point, for as long as there has been an OSS-to-profitability pipeline gamed for startups I'd guess. I wouldn't be surprised if it has progressed to fake contributors/discussions/issues/forks as well. Seems like an inevitable outcome for any platform with social signals.

I came across one of these in 2018 with a "hot" open source company raising a Series B. An impressive star ramp (about 300% YoY growth) before the (high-priced/competitive) raise and three months later Github had revoked almost all the star growth from the previous year, resulting in a 20% YoY record. The company eventually got acquihired.

I asked Claude for an analysis on the maturity of various open source projects accomplishing the same thing. Its first searches were for GitHub star counts for each project. I was appalled at how dumb an approach that was and mortified at how many people must be espousing that equivocation online to make the training jump to that.

Literally posted about this but w.r.t to agent-skills yesterday: https://olshansky.substack.com/p/why-every-developer-needs-t...

Need to move from skill downloads to skill usage.

For all the hate on star systems, whether it’s GitHub/Amazon/AppStore, I’d still take having one over having nothing at all.

They make it easier to sort through options, help with search and discovery, and at least give you a baseline signal for trust can get better over time.

So to me, some signal better than no signal at all.

I think the reason is that investors are not IT experts and don't know better metrics to evaluate.

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.

"median star count at seed is 2,850" lower than I would have expected, but than again, I've maybe only had 20+ stars on my repos

- I think the zero follower account might be the weakest signal of a low quality account, I think I had zero followers for maybe 5+ years.

I briefly mentioned it in a talk at minidebconf a couple years ago.

Download counters are abused similarly and are even easier to inflate.

Understanding the real popularity of a project is now even harder with all the AI bots spamming about it.