[viraptor]

Slightly related, but... what is it with stars? I've never starred a repo and don't understand why I would want to. Yet it seems to be a popularity contest people care about for some reason, even though it correlates strongly with forks/issues/prs so you get the same idea about usage from those. Does it go at all beyond a "like", or am I just too old to get it?

[onionisafruit]

It makes me feel good when I see one of my projects getting stars. When I star a project it is with the hope that another maintainer will have a similar good feeling.

[viraptor]

You're a good person and this made me think I should star some smaller project I use. Thank you. Let's show the maintainers some love.

[asaddhamani]

I think of it as a "like" or a bookmark, if I come across a repo and I find it interesting or useful, I star it.

[hk__2]

GitHub recently added a feature where you can organize your stars in lists, so you decide what they mean. My lists include for example "useful CLI tools", "languages", and "projects to contribute to". Outside of this feature, I mostly use the stars as a 'like' button.

[frou_dh]

It's a 2-in-1 like & bookmark.

[akh]

I wrote a blog about how stars helped us at the very early stages of our open source product: https://www.infracost.io/blog/github-stars-matter-here-is-wh...

[MetaWhirledPeas]

> Yet it seems to be a popularity contest people care about for some reason

Before you incorporate someone's Github library into your own project, you want to know some things. Is it secure? Is it well-maintained? Is there an active userbase to help with support? Stars are one indicator of this.

[viraptor]

Honestly, I would rather go for that specific info instead. CVEs for security, network graph and PRs for activity, CI maturity for security and maintenance, etc. Stars give you mostly popularity which is not necessarily correlated. But yeah, I agree they can be a single-number-proxy for the above.

[toastal]

Hardly. I was on a project with a JS dependency with 6.5k stars and sponsors but it injected a remote script at runtime without consent. I'm also a part of niche community circles where a project would be lucky to break 50 stars despite having phenomenal value and quality. It really is purely a popularity contest and only that with a bias towards other languages and projects that are equally as popular.

[yreg]

an indicator is not a proof

[flohofwoe]

I use them mostly like bookmarks, a cool project I stumbled over and want to "pin" for the future.

[irrational]

I use it as a bookmark. Under my own account I can find the repos I have starred.