Bots are killing opensource, but they pump product metrics so nobody cares. I maintain an open source repo and we've made a decision to limit all bot activity, even if it makes us less sexy in front of VCs.

We figured out a workaround to limit activity to prior contributors only, and add a CI job that pushes a coauthored commit after passing captcha on our website. It cut the AI slop by 90%. Full write-up https://archestra.ai/blog/only-responsible-ai

The real metric is: does it solve my problem, and is the maintainer still responding to issues? Everything else is just noise.

what is this one about:

> When nobody is forking a 157,000-star repository, nobody is using it

that is completely not true, i don't fork a repo when i use it, only when i want to contribute to it (and usually cleanup my forks)

> Jordan Segall, Partner at Redpoint Ventures, published an analysis of 80 developer tool companies showing that the median GitHub star count at seed financing was 2,850 and at Series A was 4,980. He confirmed: "Many VCs write internal scraping programs to identify fast growing github projects for sourcing, and the most common metric they look toward is stars."

> 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

It's not that I hate AI writing, it's just that I hate it.

wait people trust GH start for like anything????

If you think a github star is an accolade of some sorts, let me show you...

...the "Likes" on a post - on FB, twttr, LI, HN, ...

...the "Hearts" on post

...the "bookmarks" on a post

...the "upvotes"

...its corollary, the "downvotes"

...the fake dollars in your fake game

...the fake lives in your fav fantasy game

...ad inf

Can now someone make analysis of Google Ads fake economy? I'm convinced that the data they share - specifically clicks - is false, and potentially they're paying some fraction to people to click it.

My first encounter with this was when Anthropic offered like 6 months of Claude Max 20x to open source developers with "5,000+ GitHub stars".

https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss

> Who should apply:

> You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars

I can't blame people for maximizing star counts when benefits like these are tied to them. This is a $200 a month subscription, and it did tempt me a bit... Can't imagine what people would do if some venture capitalist dangled millions in front of them. I suppose they'd do pretty much anything.

It's weird that people are using stars as a signal though. Anyone can star a repository, it's essentially a public bookmark. I think the real popularity signal is the number of people participating in the project.

I haven't seen that many stars since the Holocaust.