It's weird that most people in these comments are speculating fraud.
Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? Why do the other metrics - issues and pull requests - match up with its popularity? Why would the bots starring the repo mean that those same bots are not popular? Those bots are controlled by their users.
The project is extremely active because this is what everyone being able to customize their computing looks like. A mess.
But it's a good mess.
Github was the old code sharing model clearly not designed for this. I'm sure a new model for code sharing will come to fix the growing pains.
A ton of people who would have never been able to customize their computing experience are finally able to. And it is magical for them.
This means that those same people will finally value having access to source and use of open protocols.
It was always valuable to us because we had the power to make it matter. It never mattered to them because they did not. Now they do.
The last era of computing was defined by dumbing down computing for the masses. Less information, less customizable, and more metric driven. Control in the hands of the companies.
This new era will look more free/libre, more personal, and less enshitified. Control in the hands of the users.
I think the implication here is that if we can’t find evidence of or motivation for companies paying to inflate their star counts, then we should cool it on the accusation that magically fraud has appeared in this case.
We also should remember that if this project had zero stars, we would hear crowing from these same people about how true and important that metric was. The idea that “open claw” paid for these stars somehow is mostly just reasoning backwards from the idea that no one would find this project interesting.
To support their favorite project without having to do anything for it except writing a chat message? I’m assuming that OpenClaw can create its own GitHub account and give stars without a lot of human work.
So about 150 thousand people starred OpenClaw, then asked their bot to sign up for an account to star it again? I'm not trying to be obtuse, I'm just trying to get a sense of what we're talking about. Because if it is 1 person botting 300,000 stars (or 4x75k, etc), that costs real money. There needs to be a motive for that to be believable. If it is 150kx2, then that's a much wider (though still pretty unmotivated) phenomenon that someone would have blabbed about.
There are a bunch of open source projects that I want to see take off; I've never felt the urge to star one twice. I doubt that has to do with it being easier to say "Go star this project on github for me, with your own account" than it is to make a new account on github (which is not hard). I don't think that comes from any great moral fortitude, it's just...IMO hard for me to explain without an actual motive.
What's being alleged in this thread is widespread fraud via botting with no evidence of means or motive. As someone pointed out above, the argument for Facebook buying react stars is WAY stronger...and it is still really flimsy.
It's weird that most people in these comments are speculating fraud.
Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? Why do the other metrics - issues and pull requests - match up with its popularity? Why would the bots starring the repo mean that those same bots are not popular? Those bots are controlled by their users.
The project is extremely active because this is what everyone being able to customize their computing looks like. A mess.
But it's a good mess.
Github was the old code sharing model clearly not designed for this. I'm sure a new model for code sharing will come to fix the growing pains.
A ton of people who would have never been able to customize their computing experience are finally able to. And it is magical for them.
This means that those same people will finally value having access to source and use of open protocols.
It was always valuable to us because we had the power to make it matter. It never mattered to them because they did not. Now they do.
The last era of computing was defined by dumbing down computing for the masses. Less information, less customizable, and more metric driven. Control in the hands of the companies.
This new era will look more free/libre, more personal, and less enshitified. Control in the hands of the users.
This is a very positive development.