Stop abusing GitHub stars | Hacker News Reader

Stop abusing GitHub stars

github.com

59 pointsaerialcombat37 comments

This open source project has been in development for about 5 years by SKT (SK Telecom), the biggest telecommunications company. (think Verizon) They launched a marketing event giving people a Starbucks gifticon, a mobile voucher to use at Starbucks, for starring their Github project.

A bunch of people(developers) lashed back, while hoping that maybe it was just a mishap by their marketing department.

Then the lead developer of the project, kyungtaak, posted a comment saying that he would do it again if he had to because he "loves" the project so much. And that people just need to cut him some slack.

The developers got furious by the comment, and it's going semi-viral among developers in Korea.

The company shut down the event, and posted an apology.

IMO it's github fault to use this star gimmick. Likes, stars, upvotes... all of these are dopamine hits disguised as curation or rating... The UX designers or engagement/growth hackers or whatever that plans and are responsible for these should try to predict the consequences of a system so easily exploitable to be implemented. Most successful MMOs have whole economies balanced, how can a 1 variable (can be more considering forks, contributors etc) economy be this open? Of course someone would exploit it. Github could hide forks and contributors but it could eliminate stars, since it brings nothing to the table more than virtual ego. Stop the likefication of software. We need to go back to free as in freedom, not free as in gratis.

I agree completely. Github is primarily a social network site. Code on Github is what tweets are on Twitter, or images on Instagram. Grist for the social media attention mill! And just like every other social media site, it's being gamed by the egotists and the self-promoters and the marketers and the fakers.

It looks like SK Telecom (South Korea phone company) was paying people to sign up for GitHub and star things via a contest for gift cards and such. The project runner being starred, kyungtaak, was apparently complicit in it (according to Google Translate of the GitHub comments). They shut it down once the bad publicity started, deleted the original site promoting it, and archived the GitHub repo.

How’s this any different from all the “Follow on twitter, and RT to enter our Giveaway” promotions that happen?

> Follow on twitter, and RT to enter our Giveaway

That's for promoting your brand.

> Signup and Star and get coupons

That's against the open-source ecosystem spirit, where the number of stars is a measurement of project popularity.

The number of stars means absolutely nothing. I don't understand why people care so much about an insignificant counter in a proprietary platform.

Github stars do signify the overall quality and public reception of a project, at least to me. Github doesn't have "sharing"-type social networking functionality to artificially increase the number of stars, so I think it's in a pretty natural place right now and I hope it stays that way.

On the surface if that happens and no one looks twice at that, this doesn’t appear to be so different. Main difference would be that up until now GitHub stars are at least perceived to be mostly untainted by that sort of thing.

The second fully Korean comment goes into it: [G translate]

> In GitHub, the weight of Star is heavier than you think. It is absolutely meaningful to mix in some leaps as to how devoted to the project are contributors, how high the completeness is, and how useful it is.

Do Twitter or IG followers not mean something? They don’t have the same weight as GitHub stars, but you’re def going to be perceived differently if you have a lot of IG followers and not too many follows. I assume Twitter is the same.

I feel the comment well covers why GH stars feel more immportant; starring a repo is something you do specifically when you feel the repo really helps you out, you feel like you may need it in the future, or you think someone put a lot of effort into something and executed their idea well. That personal measurement, the number of people [developers] who think a repo is helpful specifically for their use, gives the repo validity for new developers looking for a project that can also be helpful to them. While this isn't 100% true for every GH repo, a lot of stars is a good indicator for usefulness.

Twitter and IG followers effectively do the same thing, but the issue is that it generally only measures things in the spectrum of "posts funny stuff", "is popular", etc. The GH star system has more weight because of what it represents compared to the counters of other social platforms.

I completely agree, and I myself use GH stars for those meaningful purposes. But it's completely naive to assume that entities won't continue to gamify or politicize GH stars. In fact we know that's happening, and because of this stars is already a completely untrustworthy indicator. There needs to be a better metric for quickly ascertaining "usefulness".

I imagine professional Instagrammers and Tweeters(?) feel the same way about their RTs, likes and followers. But the vast majority of people on the platform are amateurs who don't care so much. GitHub has a far higher proportion of "professional" users in that context.

Not so different. It seems that typical overreacting people overthinking things.

Well, not actually. it's more like bribing people in an exploitative method. Think of making multiple falsy accounts only to give an upvote to the repo.

I thinks it's little different than Twitter RT or Favorite, It's used as a some kind of rating. So it seems like "Give us nice scores on Rotten Tomatoes to enter out Giveaway".

Maybe it was temporarily archived - it isn't at the moment.

Can someone narrate and explain what happened here?

The page is in a foreign language and its contents have apparently since been changed.

What happened?

If you logged in with a GitHub account and starred their project, you would be entered into a contest for a chance to win some products (or gift cards) like Baskin Robbins, Starbucks, movie tickets, etc.

I think they were running some kind of promotion in exchange for starring their Github project?

I translated it to English, and also looked at the images and I came to the same conclusion. From the images, it seems maybe they were giving away free products or gift cards if you starred the project.

My understanding (from Google Translating various posts) is that a company was trying to incentivise people starring the GitHub page (in an effort to justify the project internally?[1]). From the Facebook page (Google Translated):

> metatron discovery event

> Event period: 7/1 (Mon) - 7/20 (Sat)

> How to participate: Please comment on this post after capturing screen shot of STAR on metatron discovery in GitHub.

> Announcement of winners: 7/23 (Tue) (Individual will be contacted)

> Prize guide [projector, monitor, headphones, keyboard, coffee]

[1] 국내에서.. 특히 대기업내에서 이런 오픈소스 프로젝트가 유지될수 있을 것으로 생각하는 이는 거의 없을 것이라고 생각합니다. 이런 환경속에서 저희로써는 매년 매순간 이 프로젝트가 잘 될 수 있다고 증명해야했고, 그 중 하나가 star 의 개수였습니다. -> I do not think there will be many people in the domestic market that think that such open source projects can be maintained, especially in large corporations. In this environment, we had to prove every year that the project could work well, One of them was the number of stars. -- quote from a comment by kyungtaak, a contributor.

https://archive.fo/jaxpL

Without knowing the language, the images at least imply that they're giving away free stuff in exchange for people signing up on github and starring their repo.

Google translate the first two long Korean posts and you'll get the jist

I did no the translate, but could not understand anything.

Translation from http://b2b.tworld.co.kr/bizts/notice/noticeDetail.bs?seqNo=0... Hello, company T world.

Metatron discovery event prematurely closed . We will send Starbucks gift cards through individual mail to those who participated in the event sequentially.

We will inform you about the early termination of the event below.

====================================================== =============================

Hi, I'm SK Telecom Metatron event manager.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. As soon as we realized that the event could be interpreted as an event that could harm the open source ecosystem, we ended the event as soon as possible.

As an event coordinator, I would like to encourage our products to be more widely known to more developers, and I apologize for any inconvenience to the event without fully understanding the open source ecosystem.

We take heed of the developers' complaints on this issue, and we will take this mistake as a lesson to deepen our understanding of open source and contribute to the ecosystem. In addition, we will continue to support our members who are working hard to develop Metatron in the future so that we can communicate more sincerely with developers.

I apologize again and again.

================================================== ============================

I will repay you with better service in the future.

Thank you.

Unhelpful comment is unhelpful. Just like mine.

Here is a translation of the GitHub comment thread: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

The core dev seems to be unapologetic about buying stars saying that managent tracks that to judge the viability of the project, and that many other projects do it.

I've produced some rough translations (I had no time to proofread) related to this incident. https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/463b3b7e153dafe1319e5344...

I personally think that, it is clear that this is some kind of abuse but unclear if it is actually a violation of Github's Acceptable Use Policies [1] or not, making the incident somewhat more troublesome. Hopefully Github can update the policies to counter this kind of abuse in the future.

[1] https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-acceptable-use-po...

Most of the content appears to be in Korean. Can somebody provide an English summary of what happened?

Looks like SK Telecom, a Korean telecommunications company, ran a promotion asking people to star this Github repo for a reward.

The repo maintainer responds saying he agreed to the promotion as it is a way to show internally within the company that open source projects can be successful.

I didn’t read too much beyond that but that’s the gist of it.

Sounds like a valid guerrilla marketing technique to me. This is certainly a grey area but nothing indicates malicious intent. Even introducing new members to the github community of sharing software knowledge is a valuable initiative.

What is the benefit for SKT of the stars?

Just make project look more popular? Seems odd.

One of the project owner said that they are evaluated their outcome as SKT employee by number of stars in this repository.

Therefore, they made this ugly event.

Because of their wrong KPI system. The owner of the repo previously said that their work will be evaluated by the number of stars.

>You are ruining all the efforts that communities have made github stars a valuable indicator.

Nope, stars are a stupid popularity contest that shouldn't have been a feature of Github in the first place. Leave that sort of stuff to Instagram "influencers" or whatever.

While I do believe how many stars a repo has doesn’t represent the worthiness or sth, still IMO, exploiting nondev people by bribing them to give a star for the repo is quite an “uncool” thing to do.

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