Hacker News Reader

Comment by Topfi | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what is more, for lack of a better word, pathetic, buying stars/upvotes/platform equivalent or thinking of oneself as a serious investor and using something like that as a metric guiding your decision making process.

I'd give a lot of credit to Microsoft and the Github team if they went on a major ban/star removal wave of affected repos, akin to how Valve occasionally does a major sweep across CSGO2 banning verified cheaters.

View on HN

The problem is that if this is the game now, you need to play it. I'm trying to get a new open source project off the ground and now I wonder if I need to buy fake stars. Or buy the cheapest kind of fake stars for my competitors so they get deleted.

For Microsoft this is another kind of sunk cost, so idk how much incentive they have to fix this situation.

An open source project really shouldn't be something you need to "get off the ground." If it provides value then people will naturally use it.

Haha, have you tried that? I think in this day and age marketing is much needed activity even for open-source projects providing quality solutions to problems.

I maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.

It depends what your objective is. Many people seem to see their open source projects as a stepping stone into some commercial activity. Putting aside whether that is a good idea or not if that is what they want to do then they will need to market in some way.

How do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors.

My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.

How will fake stars help it getting of the ground?

My point is that not having fake stars may prevent you from gaining traction.

Organic users still have to consider it, but then they might not dismiss it outright because it has five stars or something.

The issue with that is, it's a game that never ends. Now you need to inflate your npm/brew/dnf installs, then your website traffic to not make it to obvious, etc.

I am not successful at all with my current projects (admittedly am not trying to be nowadays), so feel free to dismiss this advice that predates a time before LLM driven development, but in the past, I have had decent success in forums interacting with those with a specific problem my project did address. Less in stars, more in actual exchange of helpful contributions.

Citing Valve as a model for handling cheating is not what I'd have reached for.

Honest question, which companies handle the process better given it is a trade-off? Yes, VAC is not as iron-clad as kernel level solutions can be, but the latter is overly invasive for many users. I'd argue neither is the objectively right or better approach here and Valves approach of longer term data collection and working on ML solutions that have the potential to catch even those cheating methods currently able to bypass kernel level anti-cheat is a good step.

On Github stars, I'd argue they are the most suitable comparison, as all the funny business regarding stars should be, if at all, detectable by Github directly and ideally, bans would have the biggest deterrent effect, if they happened in larger waves, allowing the community to see who did engage in fraudulent behaviour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com