GitHub Has Restricted Access to Star Data

ateesdalejr a day ago | parent | next [-]

This is concerning, now it's going to be even harder to tell if a repo is astroturfed by marketers or is really receiving organic adoption.

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theamk a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> access to this data is being limited to a repository's own admins and collaborators.

Sounds fine to me? Why would a random third-party need to know which repos do I star, and who stars my repos?

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llama052 a day ago | parent [-]

Because astroturfing and fake stars for projects are absolutely rampant right now. Hiding the stats makes it impossible to look at heuristics and essentially makes it even more useless as a metric of anything.

	▲	verdverm a day ago \| parent [-]
		stars have never been a good metric, I use them as bookmarks, not a show of support or that I use a project, more often than not they have a feature or two that I'm curious about for my own projects

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nerdsniper a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would GitHub want to restrict this?

	▲	verdverm a day ago \| parent [-]
		because people scrape the star lists to find accounts to send emails to, they had a blog post on it last week