This doesn’t surprise me at all… Just like bots in games. Selling a service that benefits another. Its shady, but definitely believable.
Also, what if this is an actual viable way to “market” for an open source project?
On the Caveat Emptor (“Let the buyer beware”) side of things, I look at other metrics well before I rely on stars.
How many contributors does it have? How many active forks? How many pull requests? How many issues are open and how many get solved and how often and how lively are the discussions? When was the last merge? How active is the maintainer?
Stars might as well be facebook likes imo: when used as intended, they didn’t say much more than “this is what the majority of people like” (surprise, I’m on lemmy bc I have other priorities than what’s popular), now they mean nothing at all.
Also cybersecurity implications here. Nefarious actors can prop up their evildoings with fake stars and pose as legitimate projects.
how is twidium managing to charge so much more?
Their stars are hand crafted from raw virginal pixels by blind monks using only their toes.
I almost commented something like “thats extremely overpriced, why dont you set up a raspberry pi to do it for you for free” and then i realized the people who could do that dont need fake stars.
