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The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest (www.wired.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Stars don't really do that much, people mostly use it to "favorite" your repo. Or just a general "Upvote" or something

I have a repo with about 1.4k stars, so what it gives you:

  • The Starstruck badge in your profile with different tiers at 16/128/512/4096 stars
  • Visibility in search: When you search for something in Github, it takes into account the amount of stars something has

Not sure if that affects other searches, like google

Even more stars (apparently like 5k+ or more) gives you

  • Github Copilot is free if you're a "maintainer of a popular open source project"
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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Stars don't really do that much, people mostly use it to "favorite" your repo.

    That may be technically true, but sadly in reality things are more complicated.

    Developers, especially bad ones, use Stars as an argument for choosing libraries or frameworks, for example. Organizations tend to favor those repositories / libraries / frameworks when picking their stacks. People in HR are trained to judge you Github account by the amount of stars that you have. Open Source maintainers who appear popular are often used as poster people for recruiting. The list of ridiculous reasons why stars may matter goes on. Eventually, you will be able to turn a repository with a high star count into money or advancement, because that just how superficial the world we live in actually functions under the hood.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yea true, if people can vote on something, other people will use those votes as metrics for how good something is

    My perspective was more about what they actually do. Not the meta-effects they might have socially

    Eventually, you will be able to turn a repository with a high star count into money or advancement

    I think you overestimate how much money or advancements you can really get from it though.

    Money wise - I can't find an overview of "Most Sponsored github repos" - but it's pretty bare. I checked to see if I could find any example, for example if you look at FluentAssertions - A project that basically everyone uses, has 292.6 Million total downloads on Nuget. If you check their sponsers - they currently have 17. Assuming their the lowest tier, you're getting $85 a month. Which is cool, I guess, but a neglectable amount for a developer with a normal job

    And advancements wise - any actually good developer doesn't really have a problem getting a good job - And any good company reviewing a candidate might fool the HR by buying stars, but a dev reviewer or something will actually look though the code won't care much about stars

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    And advancements wise - any actually good developer doesn't really have a problem getting a good job

    True, but I'd assume developers who are actually good also don't buy stars on Github. Sadly, the demand on the market over the last five to ten years meant that everyone with a udemi course in react could get job as a developer. Now that the economy does not look all that rosy, that is changing and people are looking for new ways to "boost" their CVs.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think looking at the star counts makes you automatically a bad developer, but it certainly shouldn't be the only thing you look at. If you're unfamiliar with libraries solving a specific problem, I don't see anything wrong with looking at them from the most to the least popular. Popularity can also be a sign of community and therefore more likely continued "support"

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Github offers the Insights tab on every repository that provides you with actual data in those points. There are countless repositories out there that have thousands of stars and literally on person contributing to it. If you go by stars to sway your verdict, you are simply to lazy to do your due diligence which in turn makes you a bad developer.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I'm literally writing that it's not what I am doing, so please don't talk to me about laziness when you can't even read a three-sentence long comment.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    Your claim is that there is value in using a metric that has zero meaning and validate your own negligence in claiming that it makes your choice better than random through popularity. I claim this is lazy and negligent. Please tell me what I misread.

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