Social Proof is in the Pudding: The (Non)-Impact of Social Proof on Software Downloads

Abstract

Open-source software is widely used in commercial applications. Pair that with the fact that when choosing open-source software for a new problem, developers often use social proof as a cue. These two facts raise concerns that bad actors can game social proof metrics to induce the use of malign software. We study the question using two field experiments. On the largest developer platform, GitHub, we buy 'stars' for a random set of GitHub repositories of new Python packages and estimate their impact on package downloads and broader repository activity. We find no discernible impact on downloads, nor on forks, pull requests, issues, or other measures of developer engagement. In another field experiment, we manipulate the number of human downloads for Python packages. Again, we find no detectable effect on subsequent downloads or on any measure of repository activity.