Comment by nottorp
2 months ago
Of course, github could just drop the stars, but everything has to entshittify towards "engagement" and add social network features.
Or users could ignore the stars and go old school and you know, research their dependencies before they rely on them.
Stars are just a signal. When I am looking at multiple libraries that do the same, I am going to trust more a repo with 200 starts that one with 0. Its not perfect, but I don't have the time to go through the entire codebase and try it out. If the repo works for me I will star it to contribute to the signal.
I use stars for bookmarking purposes, i wouldn't care if they go private but would miss the feature
Same along with lists. I've got more than a thousand starred repos by now.
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If that works for you, great. I don't do that. I don't even check how many stars it has.
I check the docs, features, and sometimes the code quality. Sometimes I check the date of the last commit.
I tend to put more attention on repos with 15-75 (ish) stars. Less is something obscure or unproven maybe, and above ~500 is much more likely to be BS/hype.
Github was a "social network" from its very beginning. The whole premise was geared around git hosting and "social coding". I don't think it became enshittified later since that was the entire value proposition from day 1.
Funny, I'm pretty sure I paid them just so I don't have to maintain my own git hosting.
I never even noticed the stupid stars until they started being mentioned on HN.
There are tons of places you can use for simple git hosting. The only reason to use github over the others is due to the social factors. Because everyone already has an account on it so they can easily file issues, PRs, etc. For simple git hosting, github leaves a lot to be desired.
See the tagline under the logo, May 14, 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514210148/http://github.com...
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