Github secured its status as a programmer’s best friend by combining tools for managing software with collaboration features that create a kind of social network for the code-literate. Its success has seen it pick up a less welcome feature of social platforms: a black market in fake engagement.
An ecosystem of online stores and chat groups openly sell Github stars, which users award to signal interest in a project and can be tallied to rank the most popular. For the bargain price of $6 paid in ether, the crypto token of the Ethereum blockchain, WIRED bought 50 stars for a dormant GitHub project via the straightforwardly branded site BuyGithub.com. The fake endorsements appeared in just hours.
The shady stars for sale are part of a wider black market in online engagement metrics used by coders, investors, and others in tech to highlight promising programmers and startups when deciding who to hire, work for, or invest in.
Online stores also offer upvotes for projects listed on Product Hunt, the community platform that promises to help individuals discover the next big thing in tech before everyone else, and followers and views on data science community Kaggle, where standing out can lead to job offers. The vendors appear to be aiming to tap into the ambition and perhaps desperation of people looking for a shortcut to success in an industry sometimes associated with the mantra “fake it till you make it.”
“Almost all online manipulation is some form of hijacking attention for the purpose of making money—acquiring attention and then transforming that into money or power,” says Filippo Menczer, director of Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media. “GitHub is no different. It’s a market of attention because there are mechanisms by which people acquire notoriety and influence and reputation through how popular or how widely used their software is.”
Fraser Marlow, head of growth for data orchestration startup Dagster, stumbled into the market for gaming GitHub last year after noticing that investors seemed to use stars on the platform as a signal that an open source offering had traction.
His team bought stars from two different online stores and used data gathered in the process to build a model to detect fake stars in Github repositories. They ran the model on Dagster’s own code repository as well as several others.
Cryptocurrency project Okcash was the worst offender: 97 percent of its 759 stars were flagged as fake by Dagster’s detector. Meanwhile only 1.6 percent of 29,435 stars were flagged as fake for Apache Airflow, an open source project that competes with Dagster. The analysis was limited to stars gained from 2022 onwards; Astronomer, which manages the community behind Apache Airflow, declined to comment.
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