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Github stars mean very little. It is free to give one and many people just star every repo they see. The #1 repo by stars is FreeCodeCamp. I have not used th
by TAForObvReasons 10y ago
Github stars mean very little. It is free to give one and many people just star every repo they see.
The #1 repo by stars is FreeCodeCamp. I have not used the service, but if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911647 is to be trusted then the count is inflated:
> GitHub part is so flawed... because FreeCodeCamp inflate their popularity by requiring during onboarding for the user to star their repository yet keeping them at the top. It's like if I told everyone to vote up my Hacker News posts... and gave them the link to do it and GitHub has no remedy for that inflation.
I'm also guilty of starring repos that seem cool but have not read the code or tried to use it. I've never used D3 in a project and can't speak to its quality, but I've seen some wicked cool demos and starred it as a bookmark of sorts.
- minimaxir 10y agoFree Code Camp is a massive outlier. It received most stars of any repo at 177,914 stars in 2016, and the second most (the google-interview-university which has appeared a few times on HN) has only received a fraction of that at 28,727 stars in 2016, which likely did not use as much growth hacking. Full list of the Top 1000 Repos, freshly queried from BigQuery: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11bGpZq6ixlhrmQnzEUqbgbwTQwQVdtvILjp32vaOKBc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11bGpZq6ixlhrmQnzEUqb...
- tskaiser 10y agoWhile it is an outlier it is also proof that it is a poor system of measurement.
- bcook 10y agoIt is? I think the problem is how we (mis)interpret the data to mean anything more than what it actually says.
- wlesieutre 10y agoSo what's the takeaway, "Repo stars are an accurate measurement of how many stars a repo has"?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]