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What's unique to GitHub is not code hosting, UI or CI. Rather it is GitHub stars. People trust a project with 5K stars on GitHub.com more than a self-hosted pr

What's unique to GitHub is not code hosting, UI or CI. Rather it is GitHub stars. People trust a project with 5K stars on GitHub.com more than a self-hosted project. VCs fund startups based on the star history. Big companies decide which FOSS projects to use based on the star history.

LtWorf 1y ago
Good thing you can buy stars online! Why do people trust these useless metrics? Ah yes because reading the code and deciding if it's any good is difficult.
- ashishb 1y ago
  > Ah yes because reading the code and deciding if it's any good is difficult. No one has infinite time in the universe to read the code of all alternatives before deciding which one is best for their use case. GitHub stars are a filtering mechanism. Most engineers, when given 5 projects with the following star count - 5K, 2K, 500, 200, 100, will only evaluate the code of the first two projects.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    The first 2 projects are most likely to be VC backed and do a rug pull in the next 5 years.
    - ashishb 1y ago
      > The first 2 projects are most likely to be VC backed and do a rug pull in the next 5 years. The first two are more likely to get VC backing. Rug pull is a false assumption.
      - LtWorf 1y ago
        100% guaranteed when VCs are involved that something nasty will happen to the project. edit: lol you're an angel investor and I guess you feel attacked. I stand by what I said.
        ashishb 1y ago
        > 100% guaranteed when VCs are involved that something nasty will happen to the project. I presume you don't use any VC-backed projects like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
        terminalbraid 1y ago
        Those are the absolutely worst examples you could provide. Every single one of those companies has been in the headlines for how demonstrably worse they have gotten over the years, even being pulled before congress in some cases. You have proven your adversary's point exactly.
  - palata 1y ago
    > Most engineers, when given 5 projects with the following star count - 5K, 2K, 500, 200, 100, will only evaluate the code of the first two projects. Then most engineers are not doing their job properly, if you ask me.
    - sshine 1y ago
      It is incredibly difficult to assess the quality of projects in depth. I tried doing this for Open-VSX extensions for handling justfile: https://open-vsx.org/?search=justfile&sortBy=relevance&sortOrder=desc https://open-vsx.org/?search=justfile&sortBy=relevance&sortO... 2.4k nefrob.vscode-just 2.5k kokakiwi.just 3.4k skellock.just 0.3k wolfmah-vscode.just-syntax Go by number of downloads? skellock's extension wasn't updated in 5 years, is marked archived on GitHub, and doesn't accept any fixes (and there's a handful of reported problems that could use fixing). So while its README suggests that it once had a lot of effort put into it, it's not the choice that will grow with you. kokakiwi's has nextmost downloads, but its website and git repository is self-hosted on a site that was gone since December 2020, so also 5 years of staleness. I suppose that's another way to archive your extension. nefrob's has fewer downloads yet, but got a single 5-star review (Open-VSX doesn't have a lot of active users), the GitHub repo was updated 3 months ago, and it seems alive. Also, the parser itself seems simplistic and admits to not get things perfect. wolfmah's has been inactive for more than one year, and it contains a single commit. It was even less obvious with Typst: There are 12 results for the keyword "typst", and the leading extension didn't have many downloads at all -- I can see now that it's #2 for downloads. Altogether, downloads / stars / reviews are a great way to get an honest answer in many cases when there aren't commercial interests at play, since there are fewer incentives to game metrics.
      - LtWorf 1y ago
        But… there are commercial interests at play.

LtWorf 1y ago

Good thing you can buy stars online! Why do people trust these useless metrics? Ah yes because reading the code and deciding if it's any good is difficult.

ashishb 1y ago
> Ah yes because reading the code and deciding if it's any good is difficult. No one has infinite time in the universe to read the code of all alternatives before deciding which one is best for their use case. GitHub stars are a filtering mechanism. Most engineers, when given 5 projects with the following star count - 5K, 2K, 500, 200, 100, will only evaluate the code of the first two projects.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  The first 2 projects are most likely to be VC backed and do a rug pull in the next 5 years.
  - ashishb 1y ago
    > The first 2 projects are most likely to be VC backed and do a rug pull in the next 5 years. The first two are more likely to get VC backing. Rug pull is a false assumption.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      100% guaranteed when VCs are involved that something nasty will happen to the project. edit: lol you're an angel investor and I guess you feel attacked. I stand by what I said.
      - ashishb 1y ago
        > 100% guaranteed when VCs are involved that something nasty will happen to the project. I presume you don't use any VC-backed projects like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
        terminalbraid 1y ago
        Those are the absolutely worst examples you could provide. Every single one of those companies has been in the headlines for how demonstrably worse they have gotten over the years, even being pulled before congress in some cases. You have proven your adversary's point exactly.
- palata 1y ago
  > Most engineers, when given 5 projects with the following star count - 5K, 2K, 500, 200, 100, will only evaluate the code of the first two projects. Then most engineers are not doing their job properly, if you ask me.
  - sshine 1y ago
    It is incredibly difficult to assess the quality of projects in depth. I tried doing this for Open-VSX extensions for handling justfile: https://open-vsx.org/?search=justfile&sortBy=relevance&sortOrder=desc https://open-vsx.org/?search=justfile&sortBy=relevance&sortO... 2.4k nefrob.vscode-just 2.5k kokakiwi.just 3.4k skellock.just 0.3k wolfmah-vscode.just-syntax Go by number of downloads? skellock's extension wasn't updated in 5 years, is marked archived on GitHub, and doesn't accept any fixes (and there's a handful of reported problems that could use fixing). So while its README suggests that it once had a lot of effort put into it, it's not the choice that will grow with you. kokakiwi's has nextmost downloads, but its website and git repository is self-hosted on a site that was gone since December 2020, so also 5 years of staleness. I suppose that's another way to archive your extension. nefrob's has fewer downloads yet, but got a single 5-star review (Open-VSX doesn't have a lot of active users), the GitHub repo was updated 3 months ago, and it seems alive. Also, the parser itself seems simplistic and admits to not get things perfect. wolfmah's has been inactive for more than one year, and it contains a single commit. It was even less obvious with Typst: There are 12 results for the keyword "typst", and the leading extension didn't have many downloads at all -- I can see now that it's #2 for downloads. Altogether, downloads / stars / reviews are a great way to get an honest answer in many cases when there aren't commercial interests at play, since there are fewer incentives to game metrics.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      But… there are commercial interests at play.