Programming @programming.dev ylai @lemmy.ml 10mo ago

The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest

www.wired.com The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest

Popularity on GitHub can open valuable doors for developers and startups. Underground stores sell “stars” on the platform, offering coders a way to literally fake it till they make it.

23 comments

What the heck is this paywalled article doing here? That's some reddit-level shit.
- https://12ft.io
  
  I’m sure we need a bot for lemmy or entire fediverse that will search posts like this 👆 and do comment with “normal” link. That will be great. I saw something like that in the Masto for YouTube.
  
  Is this supposed to be treated like an image? Doesn't load for me on Sync
- It's not paywalled here, try using porn mode, clearing that site's cookies or something like archive.today.
  
  Porn mode?!?
  
  I mean yes but porn mode?
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.
- 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"
I mean nice, but anyone with half a brain will take a look at the code and decide for their own if they're a decent coder

Also there's star graphs over time that show the growth of a project
- Shitty companies hiring shitty employees sounds like a win win to me

23 comments