Comment by mentalgear
8 hours ago
> VC funding pipeline that treats GitHub popularity as proof of traction
Why am I not surprised big Capital corrupts everything. Also, Goodhart's law applies again: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
HN Folks: What reliant, diverse signals do you use to quickly eval a repo's quality? For me it is: Maintenance status, age, elegance of API and maybe commit history.
PS: From the article:
> instead tracks unique monthly contributor activity - anyone who created an issue, comment, PR, or commit. Fewer than 5% of top 10,000 projects ever exceeded 250 monthly contributors; only 2% sustained it across six months.
> [...] recommends five metrics that correlate with real adoption: package downloads, issue quality (production edge cases from real users), contributor retention (time to second PR), community discussion depth, and usage telemetry.
Overly verbose and "glitter" readme.md files is a good indicator of bad projects or at least projects which need more attention to be used. It's too often pre-rugpull or look-at-me repos where better solutions are one click away.
Finding any curse words in hidden comments in the commit history is for me a good indication of a human working on a passion project, though ymmv.
And there are always exceptions to the exception of the exceptions.
I tend to look at other people involved, like contributors but not just the volume but actual people and their other activity. If the original author is still around and active that tends to be a good sign IME
I usually just read the dang code.