GitHub's Fake Star Economy

Re:GitHub's Fake Star Economy by bjourne on Monday April 20, 2026 @05:58AM (#47832215)

> The CMU researchers recommended GitHub adopt a weighted popularity metric based on network centrality rather than raw star counts. A change that would structurally undermine the fake star economy. GitHub has not implemented it.

> As one commenter put it: "You can fake a star count, but you can't fake a bug fix that saves someone's weekend."

I'm curious what the research says here---can you actually structurally undermine the gamification of social influence scores? And I'm pretty sure fake bugfixes are almost trivial to generate by LLMs.

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Re:GitHub's Fake Star Economy by evilsocket on Monday April 20, 2026 @08:00AM (#47833054)

that's exactly the next-round attack. StarScout's network-centrality defense works for the current generation of campaigns but won't survive LLM-generated PR/commit patterns

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Re:GitHub's Fake Star Economy by az226 on Monday April 20, 2026 @06:24AM (#47832355)

I’d say those CMU researchers are out of touch with the reality. GitHub can easily overhaul this with a much better system than what those researchers recommended but chooses not to.

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