4 ms·

The stars have fallen to the classic problem of becoming a goal and stopping being a good metric. This can apply to your measure just as well: issues can also b

by 3form 6mo ago

The stars have fallen to the classic problem of becoming a goal and stopping being a good metric. This can apply to your measure just as well: issues can also be gamed to be opened, closed and responded to quickly, especially now with LLMs.

test1235 6mo ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
sunrunner 6mo ago
Was it ever a good metric? A star from another account costs nothing and conveys nothing about the sincerity, knowledge, importance or cultural weight of the star giver. As a signal it's as weak as 'hitting that like button'. If the number of stars are in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that might correlate with a serious project. But that should be visible by real, costly activity such as issues, PRs, discussion and activity.
- noosphr 6mo ago
  There was a time when total number of hyperlinks to a site was an amazing metric measuring its quality.
  - kang 6mo ago
    at that time having a website took work, while having a github account can be cheaply used to sybil attack/signal marketing
    - noosphr 6mo ago
      Forums, news groups and mailing lists counted towards pagerank in the early days.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Yeah, the time between Google appeared, until the time SEO became a concept people chased, a very brief moment of time.
- 3form 6mo ago
  There isn't just "good metric" in vacuum - it was a good metric of exactly the popularity that you mentioned. But stars becoming an object of desire is what killed it for that purpose. Perhaps now they are a "good metric" of combined interest and investment in the project, but what they're measuring is just not useful anymore.
  - sunrunner 6mo ago
    Yeah, I'd agree with this. I always thought of a star indicating only that a person (or account, generally) had an active interest in another project, either through being directly related or just from curiosity. Which can sort of work as a proxy for interesting, important or active, but not accurately.
- einpoklum 6mo ago
  A repository with zero stars has essentially no users. A repository with single-stars has a few users, but possibly most/all are personal acquiantances of the author, or members of the project. It is the meaning of having dozens or hundreds of stars that is undermined by the practice described at the linked post.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- daemonologist 6mo ago
  I remember talking to some of the folks running UIUC's hackathon (probably ten years ago) and they'd built a sort of page-rank for Github - hand-identifying the most prominent and reputable projects/individuals and then using follows and stars to transfer that reputation. I don't know how well it worked in practice or if it was every published, but it might be more effective than pure star count. (This was for admissions iirc - they had limited slots and a portion of them were allocated to people with a strong github rank.)
amonith 6mo ago
I especially love issues automatically "closed due to inactivity" just to keep the number of issues down :V
- alaudet 6mo ago
  Sometimes people open issues without proper information. It cant be replicated and nobody else is jumping in that it affects them. You may suspect its something else, maybe with their environment, but if they don't engage what else can you do? Tell them you are closing it and specify what kind of info you need if they ever get around to providing it and it can be reopened.
  - werdnapk 6mo ago
    And sometimes the maintainer simply doesn't respond to a perfectly acceptable issue due to either the maintainer abandoning the project, not enough maintainers or simple neglect.
  - jkrejcha 6mo ago
    "Unable to reproduce" is a fair enough explicit close reason. This is more about those "stale" bots that exist that just kinda close the issues because there hasn't been any response for X days. The annoyance with the practice usually stems from the fact that many of the victims of this comes from a lack of maintainer response. This sort of bot punishes users for making even valid reports that aren't fixed immediately or missed by the maintainers for whatever reason including transitory ones, etc. Constantly bumping threads/issues/whatever is generally considered rude, so this is why issue reporters generally don't do it, plus generally the reporter isn't solely focused on that particular issue

by 3form 6mo ago

test1235 6mo ago

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

sunrunner 6mo ago

Was it ever a good metric? A star from another account costs nothing and conveys nothing about the sincerity, knowledge, importance or cultural weight of the star giver. As a signal it's as weak as 'hitting that like button'. If the number of stars are in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that might correlate with a serious project. But that should be visible by real, costly activity such as issues, PRs, discussion and activity.

noosphr 6mo ago
There was a time when total number of hyperlinks to a site was an amazing metric measuring its quality.
- kang 6mo ago
  at that time having a website took work, while having a github account can be cheaply used to sybil attack/signal marketing
  - noosphr 6mo ago
    Forums, news groups and mailing lists counted towards pagerank in the early days.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Yeah, the time between Google appeared, until the time SEO became a concept people chased, a very brief moment of time.
3form 6mo ago
There isn't just "good metric" in vacuum - it was a good metric of exactly the popularity that you mentioned. But stars becoming an object of desire is what killed it for that purpose. Perhaps now they are a "good metric" of combined interest and investment in the project, but what they're measuring is just not useful anymore.
- sunrunner 6mo ago
  Yeah, I'd agree with this. I always thought of a star indicating only that a person (or account, generally) had an active interest in another project, either through being directly related or just from curiosity. Which can sort of work as a proxy for interesting, important or active, but not accurately.
einpoklum 6mo ago
A repository with zero stars has essentially no users. A repository with single-stars has a few users, but possibly most/all are personal acquiantances of the author, or members of the project. It is the meaning of having dozens or hundreds of stars that is undermined by the practice described at the linked post.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
daemonologist 6mo ago
I remember talking to some of the folks running UIUC's hackathon (probably ten years ago) and they'd built a sort of page-rank for Github - hand-identifying the most prominent and reputable projects/individuals and then using follows and stars to transfer that reputation. I don't know how well it worked in practice or if it was every published, but it might be more effective than pure star count. (This was for admissions iirc - they had limited slots and a portion of them were allocated to people with a strong github rank.)

amonith 6mo ago

I especially love issues automatically "closed due to inactivity" just to keep the number of issues down :V

alaudet 6mo ago
Sometimes people open issues without proper information. It cant be replicated and nobody else is jumping in that it affects them. You may suspect its something else, maybe with their environment, but if they don't engage what else can you do? Tell them you are closing it and specify what kind of info you need if they ever get around to providing it and it can be reopened.
- werdnapk 6mo ago
  And sometimes the maintainer simply doesn't respond to a perfectly acceptable issue due to either the maintainer abandoning the project, not enough maintainers or simple neglect.
- jkrejcha 6mo ago
  "Unable to reproduce" is a fair enough explicit close reason. This is more about those "stale" bots that exist that just kinda close the issues because there hasn't been any response for X days. The annoyance with the practice usually stems from the fact that many of the victims of this comes from a lack of maintainer response. This sort of bot punishes users for making even valid reports that aren't fixed immediately or missed by the maintainers for whatever reason including transitory ones, etc. Constantly bumping threads/issues/whatever is generally considered rude, so this is why issue reporters generally don't do it, plus generally the reporter isn't solely focused on that particular issue