No star, No fix | Hacker News Reader

No star, No fix

github.com

186 pointsrustdesk102 comments

I wonder if this goes against github's "no automated starring" policy [0] (that people have been banned for in the past). Maybe "coordinated inauthentic activity" ?

Either way, feels sleazy.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...

I fail to see a reason where it would be a violation because of the following reasons:

1) it's a response to a user's request, i.e., not initiated by the repo author

2) it depends on consensus of the user.

3) it's not automated (most of the items from the policy are related to automation).

4) the repo author has no obligation whatsoever of maintaining the project. He is not paid or forced to do it.

5) if the user really wants to apply this change or disagrees with this practice, he/she can always fork it.

That said, I understand that it may still not feel "fair" compared to other projects that don't follow this practice. Or the feeling of "wanting to help but you're asked to do some things first".

Companies already do that to accept your pull requests though [0], which takes way longer than giving a star - and I didn't see a complaint about it on HN

[0] https://github.com/google/eddystone/issues/258

It is at least partially automated. The issue was closed by a bot which requires a star to re-open.

That's clearly not the spirit of the T&C's of GitHub.

Seeing that both the devs and target audience are in mainland China, they're used to rules and regulations being more like suggestions anyway.

If communist China is anything like communist Europe used to be, finding clever ways to overcome the rules or use them to your advantage is almost a sport, and definitely not considered immoral or unethical by most.

There's a submission regarding CLAs nearly every month. But complains regarding them is not for the time it takes to sign one. Similarly complains about the practice here aren't for the time it takes to star a repo.

It's quid pro quo, isn't it. The repo is buying stars with bug reporting as currency.

Which may well be against GitHub rules but more than that, it's a stupid thing to do. Bug reporting helps projects get better. They're blocking real bug reports until they get a star. Seems like self-harm to me.

> Bug reporting helps projects get better

There's many cases where that's not true and indeed low-quality bug reports hurt the projects from getting better, specially for mid-to-high popular solo projects.

Think about it in more familiar terms, are more job offers good for searching for a job? It might seems so, but only if you think about well-timed high quality offers. Suddenly getting spammed on your email, linkedin, etc. with dozens+ of low-quality job offers would def not be helpful.

> There's many cases where that's not true and indeed low-quality bug reports hurt the projects from getting better, specially for mid-to-high popular solo projects.

So it's ok to report low quality bugs as long as you give stars?

I know that's not your argument, but this is what this thread is about.

Maybe not, but at least they got a star out of it.

Github sets up social network gamification incentives, wins social network gamification prizes…

Well yes. And like any good game you should report abuse of its features.

Regardless of the current rule, it really ought to be a violation. If it's not, all repos that care about star rankings are forced to start doing the same thing to compete, which eventually turns stars into a metric of which repos have the highest quantity of annoying problems that users want to report, rather than a metric of whatever it's supposed to measure.

This cheats the other users (like me or you) -- if we are looking at the project's star count, you are likely trying to judge project's popularity and get a measure of how many people like it.

And dae's star count is basically a lie - it does not represent how many people liked it, but rather how many people had found annoying bugs in it. Someone who is forced to use dae and hates it would still need to star it. And as you said, other projects who don't have this practice are in disadvantage.

(And that's why I have no problem with things like CLAs, or requiring details bug reports: they are not user-visible and they don't mess with global rating.)

Gaining a permanent reputation for petty authoritarianism, even with contributors who clearly want to help

versus

gaining one (1) point on GitHub

Truly craven that this is coming from an automated bot. The extent to which social media likes have broken peoples' brains is something to behold.

understood

Are you arguing that people should not be authoritarian on their own personal projects? To me this signals having healthy relationship with the project and knowing how to set boundaries (small as they may be) to avoid maintainer burnout.

My point is that if you're an organization looking to use a tool like dae, the maintainers' behavior here is a huge red flag. Of course open-source projects can do basically whatever they want. But dae is really not a "personal project," its clearly designed for use by the broader community and the maintainer clearly wants lots of people to use it. If I am considering using any open-source software, I would want to understand the devs' decision-making behind denying good feature requests:

1) The best possible reason is work-life balance, "hey I'm not getting paid for this," etc etc. I am not demanding that dae's maintainers accept the change simply because it's a good idea.

2) An unpleasant but probably acceptable reason is obstinance, stubbornness, etc. Maybe you're wrong, the feature is a bad idea. But even if you're right, sometimes you have to accept the aesthetic/ideological quirks of the devs.

3) The worst possible reason for denying a feature request is pettiness or narcissism, which is exactly what dae is doing. Perhaps the user had legitimate reasons for not starring the repo (GitHub "learns from" your stars and will suggest related repos in discovery, which can be annoying). But the idea of labelling CI tests as a "wontfix" until you get a stupid GitHub star is just horrendous open-source management.

Craven is definitely one of the words I'm groping for to express just what is wrong with this.

I really don't understand the "seems fair" comments.

I (stupidly I see now) treat the stars as feature just for me, like a bookmark in my own browser. There for my use, not anyone else's.

Obviously that was silly since they are public and anything that is public is someone somewhere's currency, and anything that is currency will expose the lowest of the low human behavior.

And this IS automated. The automation is in the form of a policy rather than a scripting language, but it's still a mechanistic rule where a star is produced by application of an if-this-then-that, and by a transaction, purchased exactly like with money. By at least those TWO different means this is not an honest reflection of a users regard or admiration or expression of value.

Github surely would see that as devaluing stars and harming a feature of their site. Surely github does not want stars to become like amazon reviews.

I don’t think I have ever starred anything on Github. I think in this sort of situation I would add the star and remove it once the fix is added.

I'll star a repo when I want to add it to my "favourite" or "interesting" repos - they are all listed under "Your stars". Is there a better way of achieving the same?

is lack of privacy your issue with the "your stars" page? consider a bookmarks manager.

You can make the profile private and it’ll hide the stars.

Can't hide the stars from Github itself though. Keeping as much preference data away from social networks as possible is not an unreasonable stance, IMHO.

You also can't hide the fact that you're browsed or even cloned the repository from GitHub, since it's on their servers.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Much harder for some website to correlate random dowmloads to a specific identity.

not a bad idea. in that case you can just bookmark them, no?

I'm using a local gitweb instance for this purpose. I have a directory of favorite repos cloned using "git clone --mirror" and a cron job to sync them every 3 hours. gitweb provides a web interface for browsing them.

I like that it lets me open files without JavaScript enabled and search the code without logging in. I still use GitHub.com to read the issues on a couple repos though.

Example of what gitweb looks like: https://sourceware.org/git/ - There's also cgit which is similar: https://git.kernel.org/

Why wouldn't you use bookmarks like for everything else?

Why?

because I don't give out fake likes.

You can give genuine ones.

not when giving a star is a condition for having a report accepted.

i barely ever star any project. stars are public and so i will only star the most important projects that i want to recommend to others.

but i do occasionally make reports to projects that i don't actively use or don't want to recommend. if a project doesn't want my report without a star, then well, good luck to them.

Yes, but this particular sub-thread started with GP saying:

> I don’t think I have ever starred anything on Github. (...)

i don't get what you are trying to say. i haven't starred anything either, and i'd consider giving a star just to get a report accepted as fake just like GP...

It goes like that:

I thought that the question "Why?" asked about this particular fragment of GP's comment:

> I don’t think I have ever starred anything on Github. (...)

Not to the particular situation of fixes for likes. Therefore the answer:

> because I don't give out fake likes.

was thought to be an answer to question: "Why haven't you ever starred anything on Github?". With this in mind I just wanted to say that likes do not have to be fake. You can like what you like. It may be a bit off the general topic of fixes for likes, but not off the more general topic of Github likes.

In this particular case I don't know what I would do. Probably if I really needed it I would just comply. If I already would have liked it or was close to it I would probably also just do it. In other cases when I would have thought about this as a courtesy I would drop it.

I have a bunch of repositories liked. I use it as a bookmark and a signal of interest for maintainers. As much as one would want to claim Github stars are not meaningless Internet points. A search engine will promote more starred repositories more, more people in general will think about using the thing. It is not a perfect measure of course, but it is not meaningless signal. It may often not mean much, but most of the time it is more meaningful than not. For my particular interests I often seek out repositories that have not the most stars, but also not the least.

I think the problem here is that Im not the person who started the thread. But I do indeed use them as a bookmark system and unlike many people I do eventually instsr a repo. The few I keep starred despite that are genuinely my favorites, most by default is "watch for later".

Hence my answer, I feel giving a star becsuse I was prompted to in order to do something unrelated is fake.

In general those things seem like site-specific bookmarks. As a general principle I want to just use one bookmark feature for all web things.

That just seems like petty behaviour.

I'm of two minds on this:

1) Good: This adds "just" a touch of friction to things. You can't just do a drive-by on the project like so many thanks to ill-advised "social good" corporate review policies (screw you, Google, for pioneering that). You have to at least star it which at least signifies some level of commitment, identity, and existence.

2) Bad: This causes an inflation war between those projects that do this organically and those that force people to star them. It squashes the signal in the idea of stars.

Github is going to have to remove identity from the stars if they want to stop this from descending into chaos.

You think stars before had some widely agreed upon common idea that was not chaotic?

I agree with this. If you use some software (and its author cares about internet points), you can at least give it that star. It's better than paying with money, and if you are requesting a feature it makes even more sense to pay with a single click of a mouse. Show some appreciation, people

It seems ludicrous to have to star a project for lacking a feature you need. What's next, starring projects for having glaring security problems?

The person that asked for the feature clearly uses the project and this is usually the case. USERS of a project ask for features

The person in the linked GitHub repo is not asking the maintainers to develop the feature. They are asking if the maintainers would like the issue author to develop the feature. That's what is particularly disgusting to me about this star-begging-bot.

They are asking the maintainers to take the time to evaluate and possibly shepherd a patch into the mainline. It may or may not work out in the end. Everything has a cost, not the least, opportunity cost.

“Libre” is not “gratis” and all that.

I have starred plenty of projects that lack features that I would have liked or needed them to have.

They were still of use to me, and in cases did implement those features later on.

No. I'm not going to break my own user pattern (I use stars as bookmarks, that's it. and I unstar pretty aggressively once I've done my business) to satisfy someone's ego. I'd much rather give a donation or bounty than go through that emotional manipulation. At least giving money is a business-neutral way to show demand for a feature (for a product I may or may not like).

Also, as a rebellious streak I am much less likely to star something that already has (proportionately) a bunch of stars.

Seems obnoxious without a doubt, and particularly egregious if reporter is bringing/offering a fix. But maybe I should try to be open-minded about this? Issues that provide even badly written bug reports are probably doing a service to the project itself. Feature requests OTOH might just be internet strangers requesting free labor on someone's generously-public yet resource-starved passion project. In the 2nd case, and without speculating on why the project owner would even care.. maybe fake internet points in lieu of other payment is the least people can do. That said though, obviously if everyone does this, it will erode the signal of what stars are supposed to mean. Hmm.

> if everyone does this, it will erode the signal of what stars are supposed to mean.

What signal? To me, starring a Github project means "I'm interested enough in this project to want to be able to find it again". That's a significantly lower bar than the poster had here, of "I've a new feature proposed for this project, and I'm even interested in implementing it myself if the maintainer agrees".

There's a loose correlation of stars with quality/popularity/ activity. All of those correlations should become stronger by having active users and bug reporters star the project.

> There's a loose correlation of stars with quality/popularity/ activity

Well if you're policy is to keep track of issues based on who stars the project, having a lot of stars means poor quality then.

I kind of understand their twisted logic but at the end of the day it just doesn't feel right.

There are plenty of projects who do not need this kind of policy to have a lot of stars.

Not sure which is more gross: having a bot farm for imaginary internet points, or the people defending the practice.

No clout, no work seems reasonable if on the nose. At least you don’t have to subscribe to a newsletter.

Imagine if I could demand that only people who have upvoted my comment could reply to it? I would get much less disagreeable replies.

Thats a false equivalence. Asking a repo maintainer to fix an issue or implement a new feature is requesting their voluntary work. This has nothing to do with silencing disagreement.

Huh? That was just a non-funny aside.

This is unethical if (1) the condition was not made clear before the issue is written, and (2) the user cannot delete their report before it is published. (It is not in the current issue template, and I don't know if it was there.)

1. The issue writer will invest time and efforts, and publish their findings. Nobody's time is free: the maintainer's time is precious, and so is a user's.

2. Now, _after_ the issue is published, the maintainer additionally asks for a certain condition (give money or a star) to be satisfied.

What if the issue writer does not want to give that thing? The maintainer is now in an unfair position: they can still read the published issue, improve their software, but is not obliged to give any feedback or even credit the reporter.

It would be fairer if the condition was clearly conveyed to the reporter before they write any words. The system should simply not allow these issues written by the dissents to be created in the first place, and in that case the funny duck would also not appear before our eyes.

What are stars even worth? Certainly not the number of possible contributors this chases away (I see issue reporters as contributors as well since they’re spending effort finding/debugging what you would have to do at some point anyways)

All this for a measly 1500 stars

Maybe to put the repository on a resume. Github also gives out free Copilot licenses to active contributors of opens-source/free-software projects but they don't say specifically what the requirements are. Maybe if you own or contribute to a repository with many stars you're eligible for that.

It helps make the repo most popular

- more bug reports

- more community documentation

- more user testing

- etc

Reminds me of how how people give trivial stuff away for "free" in online marketplaces, but ask to be paid with a good review before handing it over. Do that a few hundred times and whoa, you're an amazingly rated seller!

Yeah, that's why I hate this model to begin with (and basically never leave reviews for software). If you have to ask/bribe me for a review, you ruined the point of what a review it. It is to let other prospector buyers know my genuine experience with the product or seller.

I don't mind being prompted for a review after the fact (because sure, I will forget otherwise), but it should be a prompt, not a beg.

This is Trump demanding that everyone at a meeting say something good about him.

A star is me saying "I admire this".

This is saying "hey you, admire me."

Super gross. How is anyone here trying to say that's reasonable?

And aside from being low, forget that, it's also stupid because it hurts your own self. Some users do submit feature requests in a demanding entitled manner, but most don't and even those that do are all still useful information about what the users want.

This user is only submitting an idea for consideration, and offering to do the work themselves if the idea is agreed with.

The devs* response to this is utterly bizarre in that context. "I won't hear your idea unless you like me." ??? The user is trying to GIVE them something!

Not all gifts are desirable of course but the value or fitness of the pr was never even considered in this case. They are refusing to even look in the bag to see if it's a turd or a gold brick unless the user claims to like them.

* devs bot, aka, which would seem to pretty squarely hit the acceptable use terms that specifically covers stars and automation and authentic user interactions. Not only is the devs policy a form of automation in that it's a plain mechanistic rule no different from a line of code, and is also a transaction like buying amazon reviews, on top of that it's literally a bot implementing the policy!

The mean goose avatar for the bot is perfect.

That's stolen from "Untitled Goose Game".

This is ridiculous. Not every issue means someone likes or even uses the codebase.

Automated scanners, fuzzers, security researchers, and people who found an issue via a dependent codebase, are all examples where an issue might be filed but the person otherwise has no interest.

What a nonsense thing to have. It's not harmless, especially for large projects. It'll discourage and even runs the risk of artificially covering up potential security issues.

Don't forget, nobody prevents the user from opening an issue. If it's critical and the maintainers care, they'll work on it with or without the user's star.

I think you missed the part where the issue was closed by the bot for the user not having starred the repo, in which case - especially on high-traffic repos - the likelihood of actually seeing it is reduced.

Maintainers not auditing issues closed by their bots are irresponsible, but this problem is not related to the nature of the close-triggering condition.

You are assuming such drive-by issues are actually valuable; to me it is not 100% self-evident, especially when most projects do not have shortage of issues anyways.

Some are, some are not. Assuming all are valuable would indeed be incorrect, but so would assuming all are worthless.

In this case it's a "hey I want to make a patch, would you accept it?" type of question, and not really a bug report or feature request as such. I'd say that's valuable.

The reactionary way to respond to this seems to be to think this is somehow authoritarian, internet point gathering or just petty.

What some might not realize is the sheer volume of requests that maintainers of popular open source software projects have competing for their attention on a daily basis (I do not speak from experience but from reading/listening to reports from those that do).

Adding a bit of friction to any of those attention grabbing things, like here through the use of an bot, is a good way of reducing that noise at least somewhat. It isn't a perfect system, but it is the one this maintainer choose to use.

>understood

iconic

Why the negative sentiment against this? It doesn't cost people anything to star a project. Whether it is a PR or not, the maintainer still had to review and maintain the code and that is time they will spend. The more stars a project gets, the more support it gets. It's not like you pay for stars or it is burdensome to click on the star button.

How do toy magically get more support if all projects simply demand more stars and get them?

If you like it starting it makes sense, if you don't why open issues and do pr's?

There are trivial responses to your question, but you didn't address the issue I raised

I thought it was obvious. Not all projects get stars, the ones people use and like the most get more support in form of contribution which could be issues and pr's or other types of support. For people who don't care abour stars it means nothing, for those who do it means everything.

It's not obvious since it's false, you've just ignored the core point "if all projects simply demand more stars and get them" that pointed to the flaw in your logic. Also no, people are not binary state machines with either "means nothing" or "means everything" states

It's not a core point, I thought you were reasonable here lol. In no site with upvotes do all users get upvotes so your assumption there is wrong which I already clarified by telling you how projects people like that solve more issues get more stars. Stars have a count.

I did not claim human beings are binary state machines. If you refuse to interpret my statements in good faith and in context then you don't want a discussion, you just want to feel right.

Because it artificially bloats the star count so that it no longer represents how many people are interested in the project.... Although if you've filed an issue you kind of are invested already

My point exactly, if you don't think it's worth starring why even use it let along issues and pr's.

If GH had levels of stars it might have be been better.

Can't projects say they'll only support people who really like the project or are people thinking OSS comes with entitlements for unpaying users.

> if you don't think it's worth starring why even use it let along issues and pr's.

- it's a dependency downstream and it's breaking my actual project.

- I'm in evaluation/research phase for multiple repos and am not committed to that specific tool. Actions like this actively make me NOT want to star such behavior, nor even use the tool if I can help it

- because I don't fundamentally use stars as a popularity stick and don't care. I'd rather you prompt me to post a bounty or donation instead. Yes, that's how much I hate that system; I will pay money to not be involved in it.

>Can't projects say they'll only support people who really like the project or are people thinking OSS comes with entitlements for unpaying users.

if you ignore the meta-gaming reasons this tactic exists, sure. I'd rather just pay the project directly instead be a part of a statitic that says "we got X stars on our repo please fund us" VC pitches.

> it's a dependency downstream and it's breaking my actual project.

You depend on it but so much as clicking in a star button is burdensome? Come on!

> I'm in evaluation/research phase for multiple repos and am not committed to that specific tool. Actions like this actively make me NOT want to star such behavior, nor even use the tool if I can help it

Then the author's don't want you to use their project, so fork it or move on.

> because I don't fundamentally use stars as a popularity stick and don't care. I'd rather you prompt me to post a bounty or donation instead. Yes, that's how much I hate that system; I will pay money to not be involved in it.

This isn't about you, it's a button the author cares about, so support them with it for their sake, if they want money they will ask for it.

> I'd rather just pay the project directly instead be a part of a statitic that says "we got X stars on our repo please fund us" VC pitches.

You are not part of any of thay, you are just supporting someone making their hard work free and open source in the way they want to be supported. This boils down to how you wish to support them and how you wish the system worked without a single consideration into their right to not support you for any reason at all. The software is already FOSS, you downvote their post and anything defending them because what? Being free and open isn't enough, you also deserve free labour and in your own terms?

>You depend on it but so much as clicking in a star button is burdensome? Come on!

I don't. Something I use depends on something depends on something... Depends on it, and I might not even agree with the dependency. I'm not rewarding something because of someone else's decision to use it.

>Then the author's don't want you to use their project, so fork it or move on.

At that point yes, I move on.

>This isn't about you.

Someone requests an action of me and people are confused by my response. So yes, it is about me. I can and do just say "no" and move on, but if people want me to clarify I will.

>You are not part of any of tha

Well they just made me a part of it. Congrats.

>The software is already FOSS, you downvote their post and anything defending them because what?

A lack of a star is not a downvote. And I'm very glad you can't downvote a repo. What a mess that would be. Why are you taking my inaction so personally? Who or what am I downcotijf to begin with?

I seel at this point you're arguing with a very different person than me.

> I don't. Something I use depends on something depends on something... Depends on it, and I might not even agree with the dependency. I'm not rewarding something because of someone else's decision to use it.

That's your problem, this project is not responsible for your dependency on it with or without your choice!

> Someone requests an action of me and people are confused by my response. So yes, it is about me. I can and do just say "no" and move on, but if people want me to clarify I will.

Ok, so long as we agree it is their right to require arbitrary things as is yours to ditch them.

> Well they just made me a part of it

In the same way every human is a part of it? I don't follow.

> A lack of a star is not a downvote. And I'm very glad you can't downvote a repo.

No kidding. HN'ers are downvoting on the issue if you care to click on the link of the post and see.

I don't care about your inaction, I care about the negative entitled jerk sentiment on this thread!

Maybe the intention is that people who are not interested in the project shouldn't be filing issues for it.

Well there's varying degrees of interest - it isn't binary.

There are certainly projects for which I've opened issues that I wouldn't star, because I use stars as a way to get project updates on my github feed.

I disagree here.

It actually makes the star count represent the interest in project. After all no one would be making bug report if they didn't have a reason. Probably because they have problem or want to use project.

I might have no interest in or even actively dislike a project but it might be for work or for a customer or there might be no other option.

Filing an issue is not equivalent or a reasonable stand-in for interest and DEFINITELY not for regard or admiration.

You are right but then the project authors don't owe you support and don't want to support you if you are in that situation, so fork it or find another project.

This user was offering to do work and give it to them.

And they have the right to refuse. Do you know how many times my PRs have been turned down after I already finished the work? Sometimes they only accept PRs if you're in their click lol. That's all fine but clicking on a star is so despicable right? What a joke.

Irrelevant. This conversation is not remotely about incompatible ideas or poor implementations.

You attempted to justify the devs policy with demanding users, which is ridiculous on multiple fronts.

Because people don't like to drink a verification cans.

> It's not like you pay for stars or it is burdensome to click on the star button.

Imagine being allowed to comment here only after [starring] something. It's not like you pay for [stars] or it is burdensome to click on the [star] button.

This is not a fair comparison. The user can comment, and create an issue on github

I feel like this is splitting hairs, but sure. This is more like wanting to favorite a post but you need to upvote it first. Some may not even see the issue. Others will not want to do that because favorite is the only way to mark something as "read for later". You may in fact disagree heavily with the post but want to come back to it for some reason.

Don't you have to get like 500 karma before you can up/down vote on HN? Not far off right?

> Can I ask people to upvote my submission?

> No. Users should röstning for a story because they personally find it intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to promote. We penalize or ban submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule, so please don't.

500 karma requirement is for downvoting, an anti-abuse measure, site-wide, not restricted by any other means. You don't need to upvote the submission to be able to vote on the comments on that submission.

Upvotes are available from the start.

So no, that's far off.

This behaviour is a clear as day extortion scheme yet you are aggressively defend it, which begs the question - why? Do you profit from similar schemes?

> 500 karma requirement is for downvoting, an anti-abuse measure

Yeah, right. And a star is anti-troll measure because they have to spend time reviewing the code for security issues or just validity, it's a minor reward for someone's time.

> So no, that's far off

I disagree, forced participation to be allowed to do something in both cases, except HN isn't reviewing my upvote unlike PRs.

> This behaviour is a clear as day extortion scheme yet you are aggressively defend it, which begs the question - why? Do you profit from similar schemes?

You are so entitled and being mean! What could one possible gain from a f*cking star? Even if they can gain from it so what? What do you lose?

What a mean attitude! Someone gains, you lose nothing and that is extortion in your entitled mind. Stop using open source software if you don't understand that you're not entitled to support you don't pay for and not every open source author will have the same rules and values as your those in your familiar bubble.

I have a family member who would get upset when others would not like her Facebook posts and would message us about it. (It was one of the reasons why I stopped using FB.) OP's submission reminds of this family member.

Is your family member providing you free services alongside free AND open software?

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