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I treat it as one indicator out of many that I use to evaluate a project. IMO, commit activity, quality of communication on PRs and open issues, quality of docu

I treat it as one indicator out of many that I use to evaluate a project. IMO, commit activity, quality of communication on PRs and open issues, quality of documentation, attention to detail in README, etc. are usually more important. Stars are more of an indicator of whether I'll be able to find blog posts and answered questions on Stack Overflow. And something to keep in mind: if you're comparing two projects, you should pay attention to which project is older. If I see a fork or a newer project that has almost as many stars as a much older project, that is a very positive indicator to me, since it means that people are actively deciding to go with the newer project.

Chilinot 8y ago
I do the exact same. However I put more weight on the number of issues a project has. If there are a lot of stars but not many issues, that could indicate a project that isn't really used that widely, or actively. However, if it has a lot of issues that means it's a popular project with a lot of users that are actively working on making it better.
- continuational 8y ago
  Couldn’t it also mean that the code quality is poor?
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    It certainly can. But that's where digging into the issues comes in. You can learn a ton about a project by seeing what kind of issues pop up and the discussion around issues.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Issues are used as often for feature requests and potential improvements as for bugs, so a high number of issues is not a strong indicator of poor quality. (Also, people usually look at existing issues, so a common bug only shows up as a small number of issues.)
atomic77 8y ago
I'm surprised at how much dislike there is for the stars metric, and I wonder if it's an allergy that devs tend to have for software development metrics (which is understandable when they are abused). I try my best, at minimum, to star anything I use on github as a way of supporting it , and in addition to other factors you mention, take this number as an indication of the likelihood it will continue to be developed. Some discounting and adjustment sometimes needs to be done for projects that managed to get on the front-page for something 'cool', but then that's where the other factors help.
- sheetjs 8y ago
  > how much dislike there is for the stars metric From the giving standpoint, people read too much into the meaning of individuals starring repos. Employee for $CORP starring a repo just means that person felt compelled to star the repo, and has no broader implication that $CORP is using the project in question. Maintainers behind the repo sometimes construe that as a company endorsement, and in some cases use that as the basis for including logos in marketing material. From the interpretation side, the statistic itself is subject to gamification. There used to be a website where you could essentially "buy stars", ultimately calling into question any sort of usage-based signaling. From the maintainer side, GitHub stars are basically the equivalent of likes and retweets. There's no magical bank that we can go to exchange GitHub stars for dollars. While it is certainly exciting to see major thresholds crossed, the prospect of receiving extra stars does not usually compel people to put more time and energy into a project. (full disclosure: our largest open source project https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/ https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/ has over 10K stars and the perceived popularity certainly is surprising for a seemingly niche project)
  - atomic77 8y ago
    Metrics like Github stars can be gamed, but it doesn't mean that the number has no value. I would conjecture that the # of stars correlates strongly with other desirable things. I think of it as similar to the # of citations that an academic paper has - genius can remain ignored and undiscovered, but overall the citation count has embedded in it a whole series of factors that correlate to "should I bother reading this". Ironically before citing a paper that studied this very thing, I checked many citations it had :) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7816479/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7816479/

Chilinot 8y ago

I do the exact same. However I put more weight on the number of issues a project has. If there are a lot of stars but not many issues, that could indicate a project that isn't really used that widely, or actively. However, if it has a lot of issues that means it's a popular project with a lot of users that are actively working on making it better.

continuational 8y ago
Couldn’t it also mean that the code quality is poor?
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  It certainly can. But that's where digging into the issues comes in. You can learn a ton about a project by seeing what kind of issues pop up and the discussion around issues.
- geofft 8y ago
  Issues are used as often for feature requests and potential improvements as for bugs, so a high number of issues is not a strong indicator of poor quality. (Also, people usually look at existing issues, so a common bug only shows up as a small number of issues.)

atomic77 8y ago

I'm surprised at how much dislike there is for the stars metric, and I wonder if it's an allergy that devs tend to have for software development metrics (which is understandable when they are abused). I try my best, at minimum, to star anything I use on github as a way of supporting it , and in addition to other factors you mention, take this number as an indication of the likelihood it will continue to be developed. Some discounting and adjustment sometimes needs to be done for projects that managed to get on the front-page for something 'cool', but then that's where the other factors help.

sheetjs 8y ago
> how much dislike there is for the stars metric From the giving standpoint, people read too much into the meaning of individuals starring repos. Employee for $CORP starring a repo just means that person felt compelled to star the repo, and has no broader implication that $CORP is using the project in question. Maintainers behind the repo sometimes construe that as a company endorsement, and in some cases use that as the basis for including logos in marketing material. From the interpretation side, the statistic itself is subject to gamification. There used to be a website where you could essentially "buy stars", ultimately calling into question any sort of usage-based signaling. From the maintainer side, GitHub stars are basically the equivalent of likes and retweets. There's no magical bank that we can go to exchange GitHub stars for dollars. While it is certainly exciting to see major thresholds crossed, the prospect of receiving extra stars does not usually compel people to put more time and energy into a project. (full disclosure: our largest open source project https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/ https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/ has over 10K stars and the perceived popularity certainly is surprising for a seemingly niche project)
- atomic77 8y ago
  Metrics like Github stars can be gamed, but it doesn't mean that the number has no value. I would conjecture that the # of stars correlates strongly with other desirable things. I think of it as similar to the # of citations that an academic paper has - genius can remain ignored and undiscovered, but overall the citation count has embedded in it a whole series of factors that correlate to "should I bother reading this". Ironically before citing a paper that studied this very thing, I checked many citations it had :) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7816479/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7816479/