A GitHub star costs $0.06 at the low end. A seed round unlocks $1 million to $10 million. The math is obvious, and thousands of repositories are exploiting it.

This investigation maps the full ecosystem: from the peer-reviewed research quantifying the problem, to the marketplaces selling stars openly, to the venture capital pipeline that converts star counts into funding decisions. We ran our own analysis on 20 repositories using the GitHub API, sampling thousands of stargazer profiles to independently verify which projects show fingerprints of manipulation - and which don't.

The picture that emerges is a mature, professionalized shadow economy operating in plain sight.

Es como los likes en Instagram. No importan realmente, pero te suben el ego bien chido (y potencialmente te abren oportunidades de bajar un chingo de varo).