Inside GitHub's Fake Star Economy Six million fake stars, $0.06 per click, and a VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction. We ran our own analysis on 20 repos and found the fingerprints. TL;DR - A peer-reviewed CMU study (ICSE 2026) found 6 million fake stars across 18,617 repositories using 301,000 accounts - with AI/LLM repos the largest non-malicious category - Sta...