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Here is the github wide list of spam PRs.

https://github.com/search?p=5&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+label%3A...

Scanning through the usernames and clicking on a few accounts, over 90% seem to be from college students in India :(

Not surprising to me (I'm in India), whenever I've reviewed someone's resume and they have a GitHub it's always a few dark green dots on a few days in an entire year for several years (and often just 2 years). Pretty sure it's done for no reason other than to check a box on some recruiting agency's form "I contribute to open source"

Are you honestly that surprised?

People have started to value things like GitHub forks and stars as though they mean something. Create a metric and it will get abused, this is how the world works.

See Cobra Effect[1] which (ironically) named after an anecdote originated from India

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Stars usually mean your project is useful to someone, so they are indeed nice to see. They're also an endorsement of people who use a project and are apparently happy, so the project is more likely to do what it says and do it well.

These metrics aren't usually a problem until people attempt to game the system like it's done on platforms like youtube, but I'm not aware of this happening on github (at least not often).

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