“They will sell you 1,000 fake GitHub stars for as little as $64.”
Dagster bought stars for a dummy repo from two vendors: Baddhi Shop at $64 per thousand and GitHub24 at €0.85 each. GitHub24’s 100 stars arrived in 48 hours and all of them were still there a month later. Brand-new repos jump by hundreds of stars right before a release. Investors and enterprises treat that number as social proof, and $64 buys a thousand of it.