alt Hacker NewsDo people really put weight in stars? It seems completely unrelated to anything but, well, popularity. Even when I modify other peoples' code I fork to a private repo and maintain my changes separately, and I'm fairly certain I have never starred a repo.
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Stars have been useless as signals for project quality for a while. They’re mostly bought, at this point. I regularly see obviously vibe-coded nonsense projects on GitHub’s Trending page with 10,000 stars. I don’t believe 10,000 people have even cloned the repo, much less gotten any personal value from it. It’s meaningless.
For example, it's used as a kind of internal bookmarking system. I don't necessarily star a repo because I think it has good code, but maybe a good idea or something related to something I'm interested in developing.
Stars on GitHub have nothing to do with quality.
They are bookmarks. It is a way to bookmark a repo, and while it might correlate with quality, it isn't a measure of it.
Stars have always tracked attention more than quality.
It’s just way cheaper to spin up repos now — lots of these are probably one-and-done.
It's more of a signal for investigating "did this get spammed on Reddit or Twitter", "is this new/old/weird hype", and "does this provide real value"
I've seen people "buy" stars enough not to look at them so closely. Maybe will consider whether it has 0-1 or 2-2M.
Maybe not to devs, but I've had VCs ask about them because of popularity so there you go it's a signal to someone.
Whatever reaction you have to this know that my internal reaction and yours were probably close.
it’s my signal for popular forks
Probably not today, but there was a time when you could get funding based on just a github repo with a bunch of stars.
Claude's Code dev here, and I thought I would chime in on this point to clarify why I track it at all.
When I started reading commit data, it became painfully apparent that a very large number of repos are tests, demos, or tutorials. If you have at least 1 star, that excludes most of those - unless you starred it yourself. Having 2 stars excludes the projects that are self-starred.
Starring is also quite common with my friends and colleagues as a way to find repos again later, so there is some use to it, but I agree it's not a perfect indicator of utility or quality.