alt Hacker NewsStars 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.
Replies
brookst • today at 4:12 AM
Meaningless is maybe too strong.
I have 60-ish repos, vast majority are zero star, one or two with a star or two, one with 25-ish. It’s a signal to me of interest in and usage of that project.
Doesn’t mean stars are perfect, or can’t be gamed, or anything in a universally true generalization sense. But also not meaningless.
Vektorceraptor • today at 8:11 AM
I star repos as bookmarks. Don't know if there is another feature for that
I'm with you on all points except for it being bought.
Programming has long succumbed to influencer dynamics and is subject to the same critiques as any other kind of pop creation. Popular restaurants, fashion, movies - these aren't carefully crafted boundary pushing masterpieces.
Pop books are hastily written and usually derivative. Pop music is the same as is pop art. Popular podcasts and YouTube channels are usually just people hopping unprepared on a hot mic and pushing record.
Nobody is reading a PhD thesis or a scholarly journal on the bus.
The markers for the popularity of pop works are fairly independent from the quality of their content. It's the same dynamics as the popular kid at school.
So pop programming follows this exact trend. I don't know why we expect humans to behave foundationally differently here.