3 ms·

The author writes: > When I go to Github, the things I notice about a project are the number of stars and forks. These are easily gameable metrics that are sup

The author writes: > When I go to Github, the things I notice about a project are the number of stars and forks. These are easily gameable metrics that are supposed to indicate community engagement. The second thing I notice[...] This is a habit that you have to train yourself into picking up. For that reason, I find it odd that the author acknowledges that these are poor proxies for the things the author is really interested in. Maybe it's because I don't play video games, but it's easy for me to forget that GitHub even displays the number of stars and forks on a repo--it's part of the UI cruft that I ignore. In fact, it's jarring when people mention them in comments, or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. It's like we're living in different worlds, each with a completely different set of values.

detaro 6y ago
> or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. to me that's also always a jarring (and negative) signal. Especially since plenty people use stars as bookmarks. (And don't even get me started on the ones that believe someone starring a repo is a reason to send them emails about the project! Luckily that's rare)
- bibryam 6y ago
  stars, forks are the metrics that first hit you when you browse a project, so it is part of what THE platform hosting most OSS projects tries to convince us matter. There are other ways to check real people involvement in the project (such as issues, PR) but even these can be single company employees. I'd say we are missing open financial metrics that are missing.?