The way I see them: 50+ stars means people use the code. If there's also a decent number of issues opened and closed with comments from the repo maintainers, I

The way I see them: 50+ stars means people use the code. If there's also a decent number of issues opened and closed with comments from the repo maintainers, I'll be much more likely to try things out. Less than 50 means I'll read the code to see if any ideas are worth adopting, but I'm not going to depend on it. If a project has 500 stars, I can't tell how many are from the project's value versus the maintainers' popularity. GitHub is also a social website, so there's no avoiding it.