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I check this page everyday. A lot of my starred repos come from this page. I think this hints at part of the problem with Github as a social hub for tech. I do
by onion2k 4y ago
I check this page everyday. A lot of my starred repos come from this page.
I think this hints at part of the problem with Github as a social hub for tech. I do the same thing, and star things I've seen in the Trending page. Very often I never actually go back to those things though. That star is essentially a signal to the repo owner saying "I'm happy this exists." The problem is that there are also people who star things to say "I love this" or "I am using this" or simply "I'm bookmarking this."
That's fine, of course, but then repo owners then start saying things like "My library has 5000 stars, it's clearly the best library for X!" and "My library got to 20000 stars much more quickly than Y and Z, so people must think it's better than Y and Z!"
Github probably should turn off the social features unless they can think up a way of discouraging people using the social aspect as a measure of quality or popularity when they're really not those things.
- andirk 4y agoI see GitHub stars in orders of magnitude (1-9, 10-99, 100-...). If interested, I also look at the other public metrics: # of branches, forks, open and closed PRs, time since last update. I have also used <10 star repos in high traffic prod env with no issues. I think you're right and I'm fine with 1 star = 1 person took interest for at least a moment and liked what they saw.
- lhnz 4y agoHm, I use the star as "interesting; maybe good". It's a very weak signal that I didn't think something was awful and wanted to be able to find it again. I wouldn't assume that a repository is amazing just because it gets 10+k stars -- this only means that it became viral.
- layer8 4y agoGitHub should reduce starring to just be a bookmarking feature, that is, not show the numbers of stars a repo has. Showing it is what makes it an ambiguous social feature.