> The CMU researchers recommended GitHub adopt a weighted popularity metric based on network centrality rather than raw star counts. A change that would structurally undermine the fake star economy. GitHub has not implemented it.

> As one commenter put it: "You can fake a star count, but you can't fake a bug fix that saves someone's weekend."

I'm curious what the research says here---can you actually structurally undermine the gamification of social influence scores? And I'm pretty sure fake bugfixes are almost trivial to generate by LLMs.

I’d say those CMU researchers are out of touch with the reality. GitHub can easily overhaul this with a much better system than what those researchers recommended but chooses not to.

that's exactly the next-round attack. StarScout's network-centrality defense works for the current generation of campaigns but won't survive LLM-generated PR/commit patterns