I'm starstruck. Honestly sad but not surprising since we live in the age where attention is a currency anything will be done to attempt to buy attention.

Just look at how many cool and legit open projects have the star-meter graph in their README.md - so of course people will start measuring against that metric and start gaming it.

I was surprised myself when I suddenly saw a starstruck badge on my profile. I never advertise my projects but I do feel honored when people think that my contributions are useful and stars are an easy way of showing that gratitude. At least I think that's how it was intended. And now someone is breaking that for scraps (or not scraps.)

This is exactly the bs that pushes services to not offer their own logins anymore, now you have to login with FB or GH or $randomFamousSvc instead of the more anonymous "by email" - just happened to me recently when I wanted to use a trial account, but I totally get it - with abuse trust is substituted with control. It's the same everywhere.. even voter ID.

Sorry, that went off track. I guess just don't look at the stars anymore. Wait, no, don't do that, stars are beautiful and so are you if you read all the way to here. Here's a * for you :)

Github could easily crack down on this. Spend $10 at each star provider, then ban all accounts involved. A tiny bit of money could create a huge drag on the ecosystem.

> Our analysis revealed the fork-to-star ratio as the strongest simple heuristic for identifying potential manipulation. The logic is straightforward: a star costs nothing and conveys no commitment. A fork means someone downloaded the code to use or modify it.

This is just clearly...incorrect? You can both modify code without forking it and most software is distributed via a registry or binary download, which also wouldn't be represented in forks. For most projects, the number of forks is a lossy signal for how busy the contributor ecosystem is, nothing else.

As one commenter put it: "You can fake a star count, but you can't fake a bug fix .. "

The way to beautify the pig is to put lipstick on the pig!

This is why people shouls use gitea. I dont understand why people keep using github at this point. Its not like theyve stolen all our data or anything:))

Anyone else getting traffic numbers that are weird? I will see something like 300 clones yesterday, but i don't think that is real at all.

I spent a little bit of time at a PE firm last year. They went "all in" on ElizaOS because of the star hype. It was embarrassing.

Would be nice to see the ratio of OpenClaw stars

Star might be the weakest signal of project usefulness and also trust is eroding I no longer trust stars for security.