GitHub is slowly prioritizing social features over developer tools and experience. The number of devs concerned with GitHub Stars these days is a little concerning. I feel like at least once a week, I see a post on HN asking for ways to boost their stars on their GitHub repos.
They can apparently be purchased like metrics on any other platform.
People have used them in cons whereby they clone a legitimate project, add a backdoor, then buy the stars and SEO it to get people to clone the bad repo
