Founders are trying to game GitHub
I recently stumbled upon this Wired article. It's an investigative post on how devs are gaming GitHub by trying to get more stars for their projects. The goal: to get more recognition/VC money, etc.
Here are the main points:
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For $6 in Ether, the Wired editors were able to buy 50 GitHub stars. These stars got removed less than a month later.
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Some projects have invited people to star their projects on GitHub in return for crypto tokens.
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An academic report identified over 63,000 accounts suspected of awarding suspicious stars on Github between 2015 and 2019.
There's a reason for all of this:
To track open-source startups, venture firm Runa Capital created the ROSS Index, which ranks companies by annualized growth rate of GitHub stars. The index is a good predictor of whether a company will raise a round, according to Konstantin Vinogradov, a general partner at Runa.
Around a third of all the companies listed in the index since its launch in 2020 have raised subsequent rounds within the next 12 months.
looks like a classic case of “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” to me
My thoughts as well. 🙏 Def see why most companies/platforms keep metrics internal.
Interesting use of stars for sure, Tracking GitHub stars alongside how active that repository is in terms of pull requests and open/closed issues, and how active the team is in closing or responding to open issues would be a better metric. Lesser chance for something like this to get manipulated.
@zerotousers Thanks for sharing this. How did founders game Product Hunt?
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wow - very interesting!
Actually, it's pretty smart to rank companies by the growth rate of GitHub stars. Hadn't thought of that. It makes sense that there is a correlation between that and raising a round, or the probability of success in general
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