The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest

ylai@lemmy.ml to Programming@programming.dev – 56 points –
The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest
wired.com
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Been on GitHub for years now, mostly passive, and have never heard of "stars" people have or get.

You can "star" repositories on GitHub. I believe this has always been a feature.

You can star repos. Mine have a few. No idea what it does and I didnt get any notificaitons for it when it happened. Jus figured it some irelevant feature.

I use stars to keep a list of repositories I'm interested in. You can even put them in different categories, like browser bookmarks.

I've always just followed them, have it send emails when a new release happens or something.

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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