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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/tentoumushy on 2026-01-21 10:21:01+00:00.
So, I’m running a smaller-sized open-source project on GitHub with around 1.2k stars (interestingly enough, it’s neither a dev tool nor a library, but a super niche, consumer-facing educational tool that I host online).
Recently, I’ve had the idea of automatically generating “good first issues” for the repo to encourage growth and drive traffic to the project. The issues are so dead simple that anyone with 0 experience in our tech stack or even programming in general can come in, get them done in under a minute, open a PR and be done with it.
Lo and behold, the repo has gotten 100+ new, one-and-done contributors and an according number of stars and forks, to the point where I feel that I’m cheating the system and GitHub’s algorithm by doing this; the automatically-created “good first issues” are monotone and brain-dead at best, and even though their contents technically reach the end-users, these issues/contributions provide no real meaningful value other than consistently and artificially inflating my repo’s star/fork/contributors count.
So, am I cheating? All feedback welcome.