4 ms·

Stars are a soft indicator of community reach. Between any two similar projects, one with more stars has plausibly more people aware of its existence and more p

Stars are a soft indicator of community reach. Between any two similar projects, one with more stars has plausibly more people aware of its existence and more people who wanted to say "I like this". "I never do X, therefore..." is a closed mindset that people should try to get away from. Ok, so you don't star projects. But clearly other people in general do star projects, so stars shouldn't be a huge mystery.

RobotCaleb 5y ago
Well, right. Which is why I asked the question. Appreciate the answer!
goodpoint 5y ago
Stars are very much unrelated to quality and impact of a project. Case in point: the top 20 starred projects include joke projects, "awesome" lists and some javascript stuff. It's probably also easy to buy stars.
- throwthere 5y ago
  Yeah they’re a rough universal indicator. Unless you can mention a better one that’s just as simple I don’t think the counterpoint you’re making is very strong.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > Unless you can mention a better one that’s just as simple No. You can't judge a book by the cover and there's no point in complaining that people should give you a better metric "that’s just as simple".
    - legostormtroopr 5y ago
      You can't judge a book by its cover. But when you have to judge an extremely large amounts of books, then you have to start introducing some metrics to help narrow them down.
    - throwthere 5y ago
      Nobody's complaining, I'm simply saying your criticism is weak. Stars aren't perfect but they're better than anything else for a rough estimate.
- ma2rten 5y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is. Stars are decent indictor when comparing two projects in the same category.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    No they are not.
    - thethirdone 5y ago
      Can you give an example where the star count is misleading? I don't think I have ever seen a repo with 3x the number of stars be less reputable than a similar repo (same language / target audience).
- manquer 5y ago
  It is relative to other tools in the same space and beyond a point it is meaningless. I.e. I would be happy to find a library with 100 stars in say elixir and similar threshold would be say few thousands in JavaScript. Beyond 10-20k it is just popularity. It is meaningless whether vue or react is more popular. Also it is only one indicator between choosing libraries, how many active contributors, how many closed and open issues , when was the last release also matters as well. Bottom line is you try to avoid something very few people use or only one guy is developing
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    For many projects it's just a measure on how much advertising on social networks the authors are doing.
    - manquer 5y ago
      That isn’t necessarily bad. Ability to engage community in any form is important, and it helps to know they are serious to spend time and effort building out the network. People don’t buy IBM or Microsoft because they are the best, it is because of their commitment to support and maintain the product. It is similar with GitHub projects A good chunk of open source comes from corporate support directly, whether old school IBM or Facebook /google of the world. Companies influence what gets developed when, even kernel development is largely corporate funded. social network motives seem a bit more benign than say how oracle runs MySQL
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        > Ability to engage community in any form is important When projects are riding the hype wave and getting popularized by reddit or HN it's not a proof of commitment. On the contrary, it takes more commitment to maintain a project that is not hype-driven. There's already too much churn and focusing developer's effort on developing the hot new thing of the week to be github-famous is harmful.
        5y ago
isomel 5y ago
>"I never do X, therefore..." That's not what he said, he said rather "I never do X, what am I missing?"

RobotCaleb 5y ago

Well, right. Which is why I asked the question. Appreciate the answer!

goodpoint 5y ago

Stars are very much unrelated to quality and impact of a project. Case in point: the top 20 starred projects include joke projects, "awesome" lists and some javascript stuff. It's probably also easy to buy stars.

throwthere 5y ago
Yeah they’re a rough universal indicator. Unless you can mention a better one that’s just as simple I don’t think the counterpoint you’re making is very strong.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > Unless you can mention a better one that’s just as simple No. You can't judge a book by the cover and there's no point in complaining that people should give you a better metric "that’s just as simple".
  - legostormtroopr 5y ago
    You can't judge a book by its cover. But when you have to judge an extremely large amounts of books, then you have to start introducing some metrics to help narrow them down.
  - throwthere 5y ago
    Nobody's complaining, I'm simply saying your criticism is weak. Stars aren't perfect but they're better than anything else for a rough estimate.
ma2rten 5y ago
I'm not sure what your point is. Stars are decent indictor when comparing two projects in the same category.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  No they are not.
  - thethirdone 5y ago
    Can you give an example where the star count is misleading? I don't think I have ever seen a repo with 3x the number of stars be less reputable than a similar repo (same language / target audience).
manquer 5y ago
It is relative to other tools in the same space and beyond a point it is meaningless. I.e. I would be happy to find a library with 100 stars in say elixir and similar threshold would be say few thousands in JavaScript. Beyond 10-20k it is just popularity. It is meaningless whether vue or react is more popular. Also it is only one indicator between choosing libraries, how many active contributors, how many closed and open issues , when was the last release also matters as well. Bottom line is you try to avoid something very few people use or only one guy is developing
- goodpoint 5y ago
  For many projects it's just a measure on how much advertising on social networks the authors are doing.
  - manquer 5y ago
    That isn’t necessarily bad. Ability to engage community in any form is important, and it helps to know they are serious to spend time and effort building out the network. People don’t buy IBM or Microsoft because they are the best, it is because of their commitment to support and maintain the product. It is similar with GitHub projects A good chunk of open source comes from corporate support directly, whether old school IBM or Facebook /google of the world. Companies influence what gets developed when, even kernel development is largely corporate funded. social network motives seem a bit more benign than say how oracle runs MySQL
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      > Ability to engage community in any form is important When projects are riding the hype wave and getting popularized by reddit or HN it's not a proof of commitment. On the contrary, it takes more commitment to maintain a project that is not hype-driven. There's already too much churn and focusing developer's effort on developing the hot new thing of the week to be github-famous is harmful.
      - 5y ago

isomel 5y ago

>"I never do X, therefore..." That's not what he said, he said rather "I never do X, what am I missing?"