Comment by whatisthiseven
4 hours ago
Sure, I suppose that is one solution, but given that buying stars has been around for at least 5 years, and I have been aware of people faking stars for longer than that, I am not sure why you would rely on stars as a primary metric.
There are many other far more useful metrics to look at first, and to focus on first, and to think about. Every time you think about stars, you'll forget the other stuff, or discount it in favor of stars.
Forget stars. They now no longer mean anything. Even if they did before, they don't anymore.
Interesting that 5 years ago is exactly when this page showed up according to the Wayback Machine: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/exploring-projects-on...
In it they explicitly call it out as a ranking metric
> Many of GitHub's repository rankings depend on the number of stars a repository has. In addition, Explore GitHub shows popular repositories based on the number of stars they have.
Yet another case of metric -> target -> useless metric