[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/