Wired has a story about an "ecosystem of online stores and chat groups openly sell GitHub stars" and "upvotes for projects listed on Product Hunt". For those unaware, GitHub stars are kinda like favourites. The more stars a project has, theoretically, the more people like it and find it useful. People looking to turn their open source project into a business (i.e: the code is free but you offer it as a SaaS too) try to mislead investors by showing off how many stars their project has, which a dumb investor could interpret as "wow this super popular", not knowing a huge amount of those stars were purchased. Ditto Product Hunt, a place where startups (mostly SaaS ones) pat each other on the back.
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