This open source project has been in development for about 5 years by SKT (SK Telecom), the biggest telecommunications company. (think Verizon) They launched a marketing event giving people a Starbucks gifticon, a mobile voucher to use at Starbucks, for starring their Github project.<p>A bunch of people(developers) lashed back, while hoping that maybe it was just a mishap by their marketing department.<p>Then the lead developer of the project, kyungtaak, posted a comment saying that he would do it again if he had to because he "loves" the project so much. And that people just need to cut him some slack.<p>The developers got furious by the comment, and it's going semi-viral among developers in Korea.<p>The company shut down the event, and posted an apology.
IMO it's github fault to use this star gimmick. Likes, stars, upvotes... all of these are dopamine hits disguised as curation or rating...
The UX designers or engagement/growth hackers or whatever that plans and are responsible for these should try to predict the consequences of a system so easily exploitable to be implemented. Most successful MMOs have whole economies balanced, how can a 1 variable (can be more considering forks, contributors etc) economy be this open? Of course someone would exploit it. Github could hide forks and contributors but it could eliminate stars, since it brings nothing to the table more than virtual ego. Stop the likefication of software. We need to go back to free as in freedom, not free as in gratis.
It looks like SK Telecom (South Korea phone company) was paying people to sign up for GitHub and star things via a contest for gift cards and such. The project runner being starred, kyungtaak, was apparently complicit in it (according to Google Translate of the GitHub comments). They shut it down once the bad publicity started, deleted the original site promoting it, and archived the GitHub repo.
Can someone narrate and explain what happened here?<p>The page is in a foreign language and its contents have apparently since been changed.<p>What happened?
Here is a translation of the GitHub comment thread: <a href="https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=ko&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://github.com/metatron-app/metatron-discovery/issues/2405&xid=17259,15700019,15700186,15700191,15700256,15700259,15700262,15700265&usg=ALkJrhgqjg87-VoLvw72YcSF9dupODCQ9A" rel="nofollow">https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...</a><p>The core dev seems to be unapologetic about buying stars saying that managent tracks that to judge the viability of the project, and that many other projects do it.
I've produced some rough translations (I had no time to proofread) related to this incident. <a href="https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/463b3b7e153dafe1319e53443091f314" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/463b3b7e153dafe1319e5344...</a><p>I personally think that, it is clear that this is some kind of abuse but unclear if it is actually a violation of Github's Acceptable Use Policies [1] or not, making the incident somewhat more troublesome. Hopefully Github can update the policies to counter this kind of abuse in the future.<p>[1] <a href="https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-acceptable-use-policies" rel="nofollow">https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-acceptable-use-po...</a>
Sounds like a valid guerrilla marketing technique to me. This is certainly a grey area but nothing indicates malicious intent. Even introducing new members to the github community of sharing software knowledge is a valuable initiative.
>You are ruining all the efforts that communities have made github stars a valuable indicator.<p>Nope, stars are a stupid popularity contest that shouldn't have been a feature of Github in the first place. Leave that sort of stuff to Instagram "influencers" or whatever.