One-to-five rating systems have many problems--gaming, relevance decay, shifting the economic incentive to focus on getting the rating/karma up which may or may

One-to-five rating systems have many problems--gaming, relevance decay, shifting the economic incentive to focus on getting the rating/karma up which may or may not have a correlation to creating value. The only star rating system that I've seen that's actually useful to a consumer is Amazon--but Amazon deals with finished, immutable works and products, not evolving, living software, where every single individual rating becomes stale with the next commit. To address what antirez needs--an at-a-glance, summary assessment of the quality of the project--github could provide a standard rating of a number of dimensions. Project followers, recentness of commits, forks, merge history, code analytics, presence of tests, volume and activity on documentation, etc. This is still subject to gaming, but here's how you fix that: allow each github user to express their own values/constants for the various measures, and allow you to assess any project based on what that user values: "What would antirez say about a project with no documentation, lots of downstream forks, great testing coverage?" Now you've introduced a trust metric, correlating values of people you trust with projects you might be interested in. Think OKCupid meets GitHub, with bulk rating of projects rather than potential mates.