Honest question: how can VCs consider the 'star' system reliable? Users who add stars often stop following the project, so poorly maintained projects can have many stars but are effectively outdated. A better system, but certainly not the best, would be to look at how much "life" issues have, opening, closing (not automatic), and response times. My project has 200 stars, and I struggle like crazy to update regularly without simple version bumps.

The stars have fallen to the classic problem of becoming a goal and stopping being a good metric. This can apply to your measure just as well: issues can also be gamed to be opened, closed and responded to quickly, especially now with LLMs.

I wonder if there's a more graph oriented score that could work well here - something pagerank ish so that a repo scores better if it has issues reported by users who themselves have a good score. So it's at least a little resilient to crude manipulation attempts

You are looking for different things to VCs. You are looking for markers that show software quality over the long-term. They are looking for markers that show rapidly gaining momentum over the short-term. These are often in opposition to one another.

Making the conversations about VCs expecting thousands of stars, is thinking too big. It's probably more often someone pays $20 to make one of their projects look good, for their CV, for vanity, thinking this will get them the push that they need to get clicks on reddit, or noticed over some other open source project. If there is someone offering a 10k star project an investment over 8k without looking at the project or revenue potential, I can only think they are clueless, or picking a student project to fund each summer.

The fake accounts often star my old repos to look like real users. They are usually very sketchy if you think for a minute, for example starring 5,000 projects in a month and no other GitHub activity. One time I found a GitHub Sponsor ring, which must be a money laundering / stolen credit cards thing?

Unless something has changed in the last ~3 years, I think the article vastly overstates the credibility with VC's.

Even 10 years ago most VCs we spoke to had wisened up and discarded Github stars as a vanity metric.

Much more important is who starred it. And are they selective about giving out stars or bookmarking everything. Forks is a closer signal to usage than stargazing.

With the advent of AI, these "life" events are probably even simpler to fake than AI though, and unlike the faking of stars not against the ToS.

Stars are a simple metric even someone like a VC investor can understand. Your "better system" sounds far too complicated and time consuming.

because VC don't care about anything being legitimate, if it can fool VCs it can also fool market participants, then VC can profit off of it.

one VC told me, you'll get more funding and upvotes if u don't put "india" in your username.

Many VCs are only doing one thing: how to use some magical quantitative metrics to assess whether a project is reliable without knowing the know-how. Numbers are always better than no numbers.

This is a good idea, but from my experience most VCs (I’m not talking about the big leagues) aren’t technical, they tend to repeat buzzwords, so they don’t really understand how star systems works.

Because VCs love quantifiable metrics regardless of how reliable they actually are. They raise money from outside investors and are under pressure to deploy it. The metrics give them something concrete to justify their thesis and move on with their life.

>Honest question: how can VCs consider the 'star' system reliable?

Founders need the ability to get traction, so if a VC gets a pitch and the project's repo has 0 stars, that's a strong signal that this specific team is just not able to put themselves out there, or that what they're making doesn't resonate with anyone.

When I mentioned that a small feature I shared got 3k views when I just mentioned it on Reddit, then investors' ears perked right up and I bet you're thinking "I wonder what that is, I'd like to see that!" People like to see things that are popular.

By the way, congrats on 200 stars on your project, I think that is definitely a solid indicator of interest and quality, and I doubt investors would ignore it.

> how can VCs consider the 'star' system reliable

I think VCs just know that there are no reliable systems, so they go with whatever's used.