[ashishb]

The hacker News crowd has always these elitist takes

  - I don't look at GitHub Stars
  - I don't use Facebook
  - I am never persuaded by advertisement
  - I can build Dropbox over a weekend

Even if these are true, it is irrelevant. Hacker News is only a sliver of the tech world.

[ecshafer]

If I am sitting in a review session and the Engineer presenting brings up their options and why they are choosing to bring in technology A over B, and I ask them what their reasoning is. Being unsatisfied by "There are a lot of Github stars" Seems like an absolutely reasonable position to me. This is the equivalent of saying that something seems more true because it has a lot of facebook likes.

[ashishb]

GitHub Stars are not a selection mechanism. They are filtering mechanism for most people.

Imagine someone is choosing between three FOSS projects - one has 90K stars, one has 30K and the thirdone has 1K.

In your meeting, the engineer will show you how he decided between the first and the second without even mentioning the third.

[EdwardDiego]

Good for you champ.

[direwolf20]

Another anecdote chiming in here. I've literally never paid attention to GitHub stars for anything important. Except if a repo of a big project has few stars I double check because I'm probably looking at a fork instead of the main repo.