[atomic77]

I'm surprised at how much dislike there is for the stars metric, and I wonder if it's an allergy that devs tend to have for software development metrics (which is understandable when they are abused).

I try my best, at minimum, to star anything I use on github as a way of supporting it , and in addition to other factors you mention, take this number as an indication of the likelihood it will continue to be developed.

Some discounting and adjustment sometimes needs to be done for projects that managed to get on the front-page for something 'cool', but then that's where the other factors help.

[sheetjs]

> how much dislike there is for the stars metric

From the giving standpoint, people read too much into the meaning of individuals starring repos. Employee for $CORP starring a repo just means that person felt compelled to star the repo, and has no broader implication that $CORP is using the project in question. Maintainers behind the repo sometimes construe that as a company endorsement, and in some cases use that as the basis for including logos in marketing material.

From the interpretation side, the statistic itself is subject to gamification. There used to be a website where you could essentially "buy stars", ultimately calling into question any sort of usage-based signaling.

From the maintainer side, GitHub stars are basically the equivalent of likes and retweets. There's no magical bank that we can go to exchange GitHub stars for dollars. While it is certainly exciting to see major thresholds crossed, the prospect of receiving extra stars does not usually compel people to put more time and energy into a project.

(full disclosure: our largest open source project https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/ has over 10K stars and the perceived popularity certainly is surprising for a seemingly niche project)

[atomic77]

Metrics like Github stars can be gamed, but it doesn't mean that the number has no value. I would conjecture that the # of stars correlates strongly with other desirable things.

I think of it as similar to the # of citations that an academic paper has - genius can remain ignored and undiscovered, but overall the citation count has embedded in it a whole series of factors that correlate to "should I bother reading this".

Ironically before citing a paper that studied this very thing, I checked many citations it had :)

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7816479/

[detaro]

I'd guess it's related to how ambiguous a "star" is, and people use them for very different purposes, a common issue with sites that do not have distinct options but only "star"/"like"/....

E.g. I treat stars as bookmarks: I star everything I come across that seems somewhat related to my interests, but isn't relevant right now. In the vast majority of cases, I at best have skimmed the readme. If I'm looking deeply into something, I might even be more likely to not star it.

This conflation of purposes means a lot of noise in the signal you can get out of it. It's some kind of popularity metric, but not a clearly defined one.

[geofft]

> I try my best, at minimum, to star anything I use on github as a way of supporting it , and in addition to other factors you mention, take this number as an indication of the likelihood it will continue to be developed.

I don't understand how these are correlated. Do you mean that it's likely that one of the starrers will fork it if the original project team disappears?

There are much stronger metrics for whether a project is likely to be maintained in the future. The problem with stars isn't that it's a metric, it's that it's a bad metric.