| ▲ | gobdovan 4 hours ago | |
Yeah, but it's not a great way to do it. Short term, you pay the cost of fake signaling, which is simply deadweight loss. People spend resources to inflate signals instead of improving the actual thing. Medium term, I suppose you could see how it increases consumption, since users would probably try something with 100k stars instead of 2, GitHub wants to seem that it's used more than it really is, repo owner is also benefiting. Long term, the correspondence between how important a (distorted) system is perceived (Github, OSS, IT in general) vs how important it really is collapses quite abruptly and unnecessarily, and you end up with a lemon market [0] where signals stop being reliable at all. | ||