Went through a competitor’s stargazers. Most of them aren’t real.
I open sourced an API IDE this year. Same space as Postman, Insomnia and the rest, but at the same time nothing like them: everything is plain text files in your repo, offline, no account etc.
One of the first things I thought and cared about in the early days was of course downloads and installs. And secondarily, it was stars.
And yeah, some of the competitors (that are also open source) have star counts I envied.
And we didnt do bad, we got 1000 stars relatively easily, with the first launches, rollouts. Developers seem to love what we are doing (the fact that we are not trying to clone Postman and make sth unique instead).
Recently I did the grubby founder thing and opened a competitor’s stargazers list (one of the big ones). Partly curiosity, partly hoping to find some users or emails to reach out to. Not proud of it but ok, I was just curious to see who are the users.
Except there were almost no people in there.
Accounts a few months old. Zero repos or one fork. No activity. Multiple usernames like 4145243@ere.com. Public emails that were pure gibberish. Pages and pages of this.
How did this happen? : either they bought stars , or bot farms starred them to make the bots themselves look legit. I
In the beginning I was looking up to the stars but it seems they are as about as real as Instagram followers in 2015.
The only thing my outreach scheme found: the audience I was envying might not exist.
p.s. here is the repo of my tool , in case you wanna have a look.
https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden (yeah we have 1272 stars right now and they are all actual devs :)
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OP develops software by popularity contest:
- an idea born straight from delusion: “hey Claude, build me a version of curl that can be used by vibecoding tech bros that don’t understand anything except JavaScript and do everything in unstructured, plain text files when yaml or another type of file would have been far superior”
- replicates functionality of other software
- cares more about stars than the tech
- written in JavaScript
- targets Electron (with a long discussion about why… in the end, decided by another popularity contest)
- caters to LLM’s
- OP is more concerned with selling their idea than implementing it
- obviously vibe-coded to the extent that the LLM decided the stack
I guess we should be thankful it has a proper license. I personally won’t be touching this techbro slopfest with a ten foot pole.
Perhaps I’ll check it out if you rewrite it in a proper language like Rust!? /s
Stars are to Github what reviews are to Amazon.
Also, what’s the point of stars? Do you need confirmation to know your code is appreciated? The real metric for popularity is issues opened per week. Stars are just gamification - same as comment scores here.
Stars have real impact, some tools will give you free access to them if you have past a certain threshold of stars
Ah okay, I wasn’t aware. I only use the non-proprietary bits of GitHub - i.e. git - so I essentially waste Microsoft’s resources to host my things and they have no surveillance data to monetize to show for it.
yeah probably for companies that look for funding?
yes, the only thing I am thinking is that investors might be interested in stars as a way to measure adoption
