Maybe users using such a tool are less likely to use stars. I don't look at stars or fork count. To see if I should use a tool or a library, I'll be seeking te

Maybe users using such a tool are less likely to use stars. I don't look at stars or fork count. To see if I should use a tool or a library, I'll be seeking technical blog posts and reviews. I don't like how software development is centering around GitHub, and how it is handled like a social network. Wha's more, you can't know why someone added a star. Maybe they found something random cool in the project, or found it looks cool but haven't really tried, and most importantly, you don't know if they added a star after some time, building some solid experience with the library or the tool. This metric doesn't even exist for projects not developed on GitHub and many worthy ones are indeed elsewhere. And I suppose many of us don't use stars on GitHub, so you are only ever going to measure "popularity" aka "I liked something here" of only a part of the population that is willing to star things. It's also probably a self-sustaining process: people are not going to give stars to alternative projects they haven't tried... because the first one had more stars in the first place! This feature is probably quite misleading in the end. In a previous job, the number of forks and stars, as well as recent commits played an important choice when choosing a library. I hated this. It lead to some bad choices and technical dept. In short, when you are considering stars, you are looking at a self-sustained process, sustained only by people who participate in it, and that is GitHub-specific (excluding interesting projects that happen to not be hosted there). This thing probably pushes the actual popularity of some projects for reasons that are likely very random, at times. GitHub is not making us a favor with this feature. Commit history or activity in the bug tracker is somewhat important (though sometimes a project doesn't receive so many commits because it is stable enough). The social media gamification things on GitHub like counts and badges should just be ignored, don't fall for it and its addictive aspect.