Haha thanks for the post, I felt the same when I saw many Chinese content makers said the same thing “this repo got xxx stars in xxx days”

This is depressing, but it's also obvious and predictable, for any fake, low-effort social metric such as "likes" or hearts or stars. Goodhart's Law is at work! What would be an empirically sound alternative? Counting repository cloning is scarcely better, ditto for forks. People will start selling those activities, if they haven't already. It's another nail in the coffin of organic open source. Small players, the ones who have the best chance to innovate, cannot distribute software if no one recognizes or trusts them. Fundamental innovation is limited in large bureaucracies, especially when eyes are on the daily stock price and the quarterly earnings report. We can take some comfort in knowing that large companies manipulate their "active user" metrics all the time. If a company doesn't fake the numbers outright (no third party has access to the data, and a legal discovery process, even if it comes to that, isn't likely to be conducted with much tech. savvy; "Fax over a print-out of your logs…" 🤣), an obscure, vague or misleading definition does the trick.

finally open sourcing ideas is a biz and need a new kind of license