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Ask HN: Why so many projects set their GitHub links to /stargazers?
I really don't understand the point of showing who have starred the project. When I open a link that ends with /stargazers, I immediately click the project name to navigate to the home page. But since I have seen too many of these, I want to ask why, maybe there are some considerations I don't know.
(Just met two "stargazer" links in the past 30 minutes: https://github.com/formkit/auto-animate/stargazers , https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/stargazers)
- zufallsheld 4y agoHm, I never experienced this. The links I usually visit link to the github page.
- iKnowKungFoo 4y agoIt's analytics. Google search brings up https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/what-can-we-learn-from-our-github-stars/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/what-can-we-learn-from-ou... "Years ago I dedicated a Flex Friday (our version of 20% time) to stargazers, a tool to query the CockroachDB repository for information about its GitHub stars and analyze the results. At the time of writing, we had 6,000+ stars (which felt like a lot), and the data in this blog will be based on that original set of 6,000 stargazers." Which links to https://github.com/spencerkimball/stargazers https://github.com/spencerkimball/stargazers "GitHub allows visitors to star a repo to bookmark it for later perusal. Stars represent a casual interest in a repo, and when enough of them accumulate, it's natural to wonder what's driving interest. Stargazers attempts to get a handle on who these users are by finding out what else they've starred, which other repositories they've contributed to, and who's following them on GitHub."
- forgotpwd16 4y agoThis doesn't answer OP's question. OP asks why projects link to the page showing who starred them, not what some tool named stargazers does or/and what data can be gathered from people that starred a project. edit: Thinking about it, probably does. Basically someone will check the stargazers page to find what people that have starred a particular project are up to or what else they may have found. This may seen as a waste of time on projects with numerous stars but becomes really useful in small niche projects with low number of stars.
- WorldMaker 4y agoMy impression is that it's the Github equivalent to YouTube's ubiquitous "Please Like and Subscribe".
- novoreorx 4y agoYes, but YouTube doesn't have a page to show the subscribers of a channel lol
- forgotpwd16 4y ago>Just met two "stargazer" links in the past 30 minutes Do you met those through the GitHub button shown on their homepage? The left part ("Star") will take you to the project's repo home, whereas the right part (number of people that starred project) will take you the stargazers page. It's kinda unintuitive since they appear like they perform an action but only the fork button does.
- novoreorx 4y agoExactly, seems most of them are from https://ghbtns.com/ https://ghbtns.com/, which is not an official GitHub tool. If GitHub can make a special page to confirm starring the project, it would be ideal to use in this situation.