4.5 Million Fake Stars in GitHub ！ https://arxiv.org/html/2412.13459v1#S4
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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I don't understand...
Stars are like thumbs up but for code on github. For software developers, employers will sometimes ask to look at your personal github account as part of the interview process. Employers make the assumption that more stars mean that person's work is more valuable and thus more worthy of being hired.
This in turn caused a market for bot stars to spring up. You can buy stars by the hundreds now.
Of all the reasons for bot services to exist, I think this one is at least a net neutral. At least this way they're not pushing a political agenda, or trying to steal money. They're just tryna get a job.
Ima start starring things that help. I had no idea it was anything more than a popularity contest for this sort of thing.
as with everything these days, there is unfortuntly a pretty big downside to github stars being so easy to buy: bad actors can now post malicious code and immidiatly buy thousands of stars making it look like thier code has been approved by thousands of people.
since its a big task for many people to directly read the code of the Foss apps they install, github stars are how a lot of people judge a projects validity, so it's still a bad thing to have fake stars
thanks!