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Comment by matt_kantor | Hacker News Reader

> If one library has 1,000 stars and the other has 15, I'm going to default to the 1,000 stars.

Will you continue to do this after reading TFA?

<10 Stars is a strong signal, that a repo is not relevant to anyone except maybe the maintainer. This fact does not change even if other repos have bough 10.000 stars.

I don't know how often this happens, but what about repositories that would "naturally" have <10 stars if not for buying them? Is the signal you're referring to still useful if it can be artificially silenced by spending some money?

why would it be a strong signal? have you ever starred a project? I don't

More stars = More followers = More people interested and contribute. Even with fake, there will be more people joining the project because they are duped. Still though it is going to get more attention.

I will. I have other heuristics too, like there are plenty of starred libraries that are just hard to use or don't actually fit my use case. But if I choose the 1000 star one and it works easily, then cool. If it doesn't, I'll try the 15 star one. If it works, cool. If not, then I'll probably end up vibe coding my own thing.

Why not? Buying stars is also a positive signal on commitment.

i.e. if the maintainer is serious enough to buy stars, is not in theory likely to spend time /money in maintaining /improving the project also ?.

Presumably he wouldn't just want fake users but also real users, which is a signal than a just purely hobby project, that is vibe-coded on a whim over a weekend and abandoned?

It's a positive signal for fraud and willingness to deceive.

> i.e. if the maintainer is serious enough to buy stars, is not in theory likely to spend time /money in maintaining /improving the project also ?.

i mean if maintainers clearly spend much more time and effort on fraud than actually improving the project, why should I at all believe they would, let alone trust their judgement with regards to other things such as technical choices for example

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