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Comment by ssddanbrown | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but out of interest, I noticed your GitHub readme states the below, accompanied with a large GIF of showing someone how to press the star button:

> The project is constantly improving with new changes being implemented on a daily basis. You can keep up by hitting the Star button!

I'm seeing this as a trend, but how does this actually work? Are you scraping user details from their profile pages, and are you sure that's allowed? Are you using some mechanism in GitHub to update users that have starred? Without understanding the actual mechanism used to keep users up-to-date, as hinted, it feels like misleading users to gain stars.

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Misleading users for GitHub stars... that's a paddling!

Maybe it's like the YouTube Like and Subscribe, except for the part where they contact you for new releases. It's a lot less pushy to tell people to star your repo than asking them to subscribe to issues and become a contributor on equal footing.

You need something like "stars" or "project member" as part of your contributor ladder.

Did you know that YouTube channels cannot get a non-randomized URL or be searchable by the channel title unless you have 1000 subs? (How do you get 1000 subs when nobody can search for or find your channel unless you hand them a link? I guess by pounding pavement...)

As an OSS maintainer, I don't think that stars do anything except for number go up, but you'd be surprised the things that "number go up" can help with.

The For you feed [1] (currently in beta) supposedly does that, one of the things it will populate with is, updates about your starred repos.

[1]https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how it works but on my Github feed I think I get updates from products I star. This is my first open source project and I saw some other popular projects doing it. I'm basically using it to measure interest in the idea/project so that I can decide to pursue working on it publicly or just keep it for myself.

YMMV, but the “For You (beta)” tab on GitHub shows releases on repos I've starred (but not followed). The “Following” tab does not.

It did, and for a while my following tab was flooded with updates from repos I've starred. I've starred so many repos over the years it made it impossible to see updates related to my stuff. I think that is why the For You was created, I assume people complained.

Probably Github itself gives stargazers updates on what they starred

it doesn't

it does, if you visit the "For you" tab in your dashboard you should see new releases from repos you've starred.

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