[saleemkce]

" I don't see how the number of stars is anything other than a vanity metric"

No, you can't say like that. It actually describes the usefulness and impact of github project. Who will come, check out the repo and star without estimating its usefulness, issues count, contributor count or code commit frequency and its impact on public websites and usefulness for the web? all these factors project that the project is having some "useful" rather than some sort of "vanity".

[detaro]

Lots of people, given its the closest Github has to a "bookmark" feature.