Comment by ecshafer

12 hours ago

I have literally never looked at github stars as a measure of quality or had it affect my decision. I have looked at git logs, websites, issues, etc. But I would be genuinely worried if someone used github stars as an indication. So many honestly stupid projects have a lot of stars, and stellar ones have next to none.

https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

proof here. The top are taken by chinese educational repos. Elastic Search and Spring Boot are the only projects actually used by anyone in the top 10. But why would I trust the stars for spring boot over the fact its used in every java shop on the planet?

2 comments

ecshafer

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dirkc  3 hours ago

I don't rely on stars as the main signal of quality, but very low stars could stop me from looking into the things that I do use as a signal:

   - number of contributors
   - open issues
   - merged and unmerged PRs
   - commit history
   - the code
   - project governance

Some of these are also tied into GitHub rather than the git repo itself

ashishb  9 hours ago

The hacker News crowd has always these elitist takes

  - I don't look at GitHub Stars
  - I don't use Facebook
  - I am never persuaded by advertisement
  - I can build Dropbox over a weekend

Even if these are true, it is irrelevant. Hacker News is only a sliver of the tech world.