This doesn’t surprise me at all… Just like bots in games. Selling a service that benefits another. Its shady, but definitely believable.
Also, what if this is an actual viable way to “market” for an open source project?
You can buy any metric on the web. Amazon reviews, YouTube subscribers and likes, X followers, Reddit karma, …. I am not surprised that GitHub stars are one of them.
On the Caveat Emptor (“Let the buyer beware”) side of things, I look at other metrics well before I rely on stars.
How many contributors does it have? How many active forks? How many pull requests? How many issues are open and how many get solved and how often and how lively are the discussions? When was the last merge? How active is the maintainer?
Stars might as well be facebook likes imo: when used as intended, they didn’t say much more than “this is what the majority of people like” (surprise, I’m on lemmy bc I have other priorities than what’s popular), now they mean nothing at all.
Why a real person would star a project? When I star a project then my GitHub home is littered with activity from that project. I hate that, so I never star anything
you can turn off notifications from starred projects
how is twidium managing to charge so much more?
Programming never needed these sorts of social media features in the first place. Do you part by getting your projects off of Microsoft’s social media platform used to try to sell you Copilot AI & take a cut of your donations to projects with Sponsors.
Federated repo hosting website when?
Radicle can do it presently but a lot folks dismissed them since they worked on cryptocurrency stuff independently. Weird thing to be hung up on considering they were separate endeavors, but folks are fickle.
open collective has a minimum star limit to signup.
But they accepted our project even though we didn’t meet it. I always thought it was silly, and was glad they were flexible.
Amazing. Good thing I don’t use GitHub :)
Also cybersecurity implications here. Nefarious actors can prop up their evildoings with fake stars and pose as legitimate projects.
I almost commented something like “thats extremely overpriced, why dont you set up a raspberry pi to do it for you for free” and then i realized the people who could do that dont need fake stars.
What is Twidium’s deal? They are the most expensive and take the longest.
Obviously their stars are the bestest
I think you’re joking, but if their accounts dont get banned immediately and the stars removed a week after you pay, then their stars are actually the bestest
There’s a chance their stars take so long because they might be using click farms to manually generate them which would be harder for spam detection to catch compared to generating stars with bots and hacked accounts, since technically there are actually x many people actually giving you stars, they’re just being paid to do so.
Its not good that some of these are instant. I guess they try to make it look organic.
Can we get a nice chart for Upvotes on Reddit costs? Asking for a friend. /s
I am not a programmer. But I have been using github as an end user for years, downloading programs I like and whatnot. Today I realized there are stars on github. Literally never even noticed.
There is a clear situation in Foss( even more in self hosting) where projects are presented as free open source but they are intended to monetize at the end and use the community help for development.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with monetizing FOSS. People gotta eat.
Can you give examples of this? What is the coat to the end user? Hardware, IT-services (VPS, and alike?) or like map providers using OSM data?
Why would it be? Software is good based on it’s use and recommendations from real folk, not *s. Many project not on github
But stars equal discoverabiliy, or at least contribute a good chunk to it.
I never went with a software project from random scrolling. It has no value to me if it doesn’t meet a need I have right now.
No contributor is going to be good that doesn’t use it.
Yeah, I’d argue that the project can be good and not widely used. Do you think that there are projects with real use case and are great open source software and not widely used because its buried under the *s?
It could be a relatively inexpensive way for niche marketing. Especially if the developer has a payment option with the software. Probably a decent way to get the software out in the open for profitability, no?
From a pragmatic standpoint, yeah it would accomplish that goal. However, that discounts the intended purpose of the stars, which is to represent an individuals attribution of personal value and trust. They lose significance and become misleading if you can buy them, which holds true even for good software. When we see a github star is should represent someone who has used the software, finds value in it or who respects and trusts the project.
That is more down to poor marketing. Here on Lemmy or reddit there are big open source communities where you can extol the values of it.
Just trying to play a little devils advocate. Not saying that its ethical to do it, but if morals/ethics don’t play a part in the decision, it could prove useful. Besides, I’d imagine that its already being extorted pretty heavily if there’s that much competition for sellers, hah.
For anyone interested in reading more on this type of thing, the colloquial term seems to be “SMM panel” where SMM is “social media marketing”. EN Wikipedia has nothing of course, but DE has this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMM-Panel.
Link doesn’t work for me on mobile.
Why would the En version “obviously” have nothing?
Is that to say SMM scams are largely paid for by Germans?
Why do you say it’s obvious that the English wiki “has nothing”?
