The GitHub Black Market That Helps Coders Cheat the Popularity Contest
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.
What the heck is this paywalled article doing here? That's some reddit-level shit.
It's not paywalled here, try using porn mode, clearing that site's cookies or something like archive.today.
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.
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"
Permanently Deleted
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