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It doesn't matter. A project that has 500 stars is most likely going to have more active users than another one solving the same problem, but with only 5 stars.
by gridlockd 6y ago
It doesn't matter. A project that has 500 stars is most likely going to have more active users than another one solving the same problem, but with only 5 stars.
Similarly, a project that has 5000 unanswered issues is going to have more users than one with 50 closed issues.
In lieu of any better metric, this is the way to gauge popularity.
- lucb1e 6y ago> It doesn't matter. [Repeats previous argument.] Not sure why I bothered replying to you if you're literally saying "I don't care what you just wrote"
- gridlockd 6y agoIf I didn't care what you wrote, I would not have replied to explain why your concern doesn't matter. I did not repeat the argument. Let me explain it differently: Let's say that on average N% of people give a project a star because they're active users and (100-N)% give a star for any other reason. There is no reason to assume that N will be significantly different for similar projects. I don't know N, but it doesn't matter how big N is, more stars still imply more active users. Is there going to be variance here? Of course, but it's unlikely to distort the metric to the point where it becomes invalid, unless you have very samples (stars). Indeed, if there's one project with 10 stars and another with 5 stars, the chances are high that it's just noise. You cannot get a good estimate of which project has more active users in that case. However, you can tell that neither are popular and both are risky dependencies.