[p2detar]

Totally agree with you. I think Github "stars" are a relic of the past. They should be renamed to "Bookmarks" and exist as a tool for users to just mark interesting repositories. By no means should a repository keep a count of how many people bookmarked it. It makes no practical sense. Active maintainers and commit dates are much better metric.

[dredds]

> Active maintainers and commit dates are much better metric.

But in an age of bots/agents, that's just kicking the can down the road by making it easier to fudge regular activity of practically zero importance. Even worse for the ecosystem than paid like counts.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

As someone else pointed out... When commits are this cheap, if that's the metric to be gamed, it will be gamed.

You just create 5 GitHub accounts, and spread your Claude Code commits to 5 separate accounts to make it look like there's 5 active contributors.

If anything, we're better off with a fake star economy that is the main thing most people are trying to game, so the signal to noise can still be that it (at least so far) seems pretty easy to tell how many REAL active contributors there are.

Though, I should note, 2 heads are not always better than 1.

I'm more interested in a repository that has commits only from two geniuses than a repository that has 100s of morons contributing to it.