[JohnTHaller]

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.

[captn3m0]

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

[envolt]

> 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.

[lone_haxx0r]

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

[PascLeRasc]

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.

[skinnymuch]

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.

[judge2020]

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.

[skinnymuch]

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.

[judge2020]

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.

[dpau]

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".

[untog]

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.

[gpcrash]

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

[TheBystander]

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.

[sinoru]

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".

[judge2020]

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