this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023

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

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What the heck is this paywalled article doing here? That's some reddit-level shit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

https://12ft.io

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Great idea for a project!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is this supposed to be treated like an image? Doesn't load for me on Sync

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's a link to a paywall removing service/proxy. It should not show as an image.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think you linked it wrong. Maybe try removing the !

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the heads-up. It was my lemmy client that did it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Been on GitHub for years now, mostly passive, and have never heard of "stars" people have or get.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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"

[+] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yea true, if people can vote on something, other people will use those votes as metrics for how good something is

My perspective was more about what they actually do. Not the meta-effects they might have socially

Eventually, you will be able to turn a repository with a high star count into money or advancement

I think you overestimate how much money or advancements you can really get from it though.

Money wise - I can't find an overview of "Most Sponsored github repos" - but it's pretty bare. I checked to see if I could find any example, for example if you look at FluentAssertions - A project that basically everyone uses, has 292.6 Million total downloads on Nuget. If you check their sponsers - they currently have 17. Assuming their the lowest tier, you're getting $85 a month. Which is cool, I guess, but a neglectable amount for a developer with a normal job

And advancements wise - any actually good developer doesn't really have a problem getting a good job - And any good company reviewing a candidate might fool the HR by buying stars, but a dev reviewer or something will actually look though the code won't care much about stars

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't think looking at the star counts makes you automatically a bad developer, but it certainly shouldn't be the only thing you look at. If you're unfamiliar with libraries solving a specific problem, I don't see anything wrong with looking at them from the most to the least popular. Popularity can also be a sign of community and therefore more likely continued "support"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Shitty companies hiring shitty employees sounds like a win win to me