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Inside GitHub's Fake Star Economy | Awesome Agents

awesomeagents.ai · 3,104 words · saved by 3 readers

Six million fake stars, $0.06 per click, and a VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction. We ran our own analysis on 20 repos and found the fingerprints.

TL;DR A peer-reviewed CMU study (ICSE 2026) found 6 million fake stars across 18,617 repositories using 301,000 accounts - with AI/LLM repos the largest non-malicious category Stars sell for $0.03 to $0.85 each on at least a dozen websites, Fiverr gigs, and Telegram channels - no dark web required VCs explicitly use stars as sourcing signals: Redpoint found the median star count at seed is 2,850 , and firms run automated scrapers to find fast-growing repos We ran our own analysis sampling 150 profiles per repo across 20 projects and found repos where 36-76% of stargazers have zero followers an

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