If you look at the purpose of this Tea protocol it is exactly to provide a chain of credibility. Though, by connecting ranking with monetization, tea has created perverse incentives, leading spammers to pump up their tea ranking, by linking and starring packages in circles. Their goal is to make it look like it’s a highly used package.

Luckily, nobody thinks that tea ranking matters, except for the spammers themselves.

They are with no doubt attempting to poke at other more established metrics as well. This could eventually fool an AI or even humans.