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Comment by gobdovan

6 hours ago

These kinds of articles make you feel like there are specific, actionable problems that just need an adjustment and then they disappear. However, the system is much worse than you'd expect. Studies like this are extremely valuable, but they don't address the systematic problems affecting all signaling channels: most signals themselves have been manufactured into a product.

Build a SaaS and you'll have "journalists" asking if they can include you in their new "Top [your category] Apps in [current year]", you just have to pay $5k for first place, $3k for second, and so on (with a promotional discount for first place, since it's your first interaction).

You'll get "promoters" offering to grow your social media following, which is one reason companies may not even realize that some of their own top accounts and GitHub stars are mostly bots.

You'll get "talent scouts" claiming they can find you experts exactly in your niche, but in practice they just scrape and spam profiles with matching keywords on platforms like LinkedIn once you show interest, while simultaneously telling candidates that they work with companies that want them.

And in hiring, you'll see candidates sitting in interview farms quite clearly in East Asia, connecting through Washington D.C. IPs, present themselves with generic European names, with synthetic camera backgrounds, who somehow ace every question, and list experience with every technology you mention in the job post in their CVs already (not hyperbole, I've seen exactly this happen).

If a metric or signal matters, there is already an ecosystem built to fake it, and faking it starts to be operational and just another part of doing business.

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gobdovan

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vachina  6 hours ago

It all boils down to making more money.

  • gobdovan  6 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.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

  • mankins  5 hours ago

    The spoilage by money is half right, but I think the more interesting part is where the money ends up and how that influences the system.

    I'm increasingly convinced the issue isn't feedback itself, but centralized, global, aggregated feedback that becomes game-able without stronger identity signals.

    Right now the incentives are tied (correctly or not) to these global metrics, so you get a market for faking them, with money flowing to whoever is best at juicing that signal.

    If instead the signal was based on actual usage and attributions by actual developers, the incentives shift. With localized insight (think "Yeah, I like Golang") it becomes both harder to fake and harder to get at the metric rollup.

    Useful reputation on the web is actually much more localized and personal. I gladly receive updates on and would support the repos I've starred. If I could chose where to put my dollars (not an investors), it would likely include the list of repos I've personally curated.

    This suggests a different direction: instead of asking "how many stars does this have?", ask "who is actually depending on this, and in what context?" or better retroactively compare your top-n repos to mine and we'll get a metric seen through our lenses. If you want to include everyone in that aggregation you'll end up where we are now, but if in stead you chose the list, well, the stars could align as a good metric once more.

    The interesting part is that the web already contains most of that information, we just don't treat identity as a part of the signal (yet? universally?).

    • aquariusDue  4 hours ago

      Tangential but I have more than 5k repos starred (according to my GitHub profile) organized into lists but the way I discover interesting stuff on GitHub these days is through people I follow. Follow interesting people, find interesting stuff. Sometimes it's that easy.

      What's more it became obvious to me two or so years ago that GitHub is going the way of LinkedIn slowly but surely. Lots of professionals on there just because it's expected of them, some interact occasionally with the "social media" aspect of it and fewer still really thrive on that part. Time will tell how this will pan out but just look how many Developer and Linux influencers became huge on YouTube and other places this last year. Most of them barely had more than 10k subscribers 3 years ago and now people look to them for their next tech stack and hot framework/tool/library/distro and so on.

whattheheckheck  5 hours ago

Yeah imagine how nature feels with all of the fake eyes and other fake predator signals like bright colors. Evolution finds a way