This seems like it might be a bit of a contrarian view based on the other comments but I use them to get a quick overall sense of a project. Generally I'm inter

This seems like it might be a bit of a contrarian view based on the other comments but I use them to get a quick overall sense of a project. Generally I'm interested in using projects with a relatively proven history and a good community -- both of which roughly translates to stars. They're also a pretty good metric for comparing similar projects at a glance. That said, I'm certainly not put off by or dismiss project with few or no stars, it just means that I'll look slightly deeper before making an assessment.