Do people really put weight in stars? It seems completely unrelated to anything but, well, popularity. Even when I modify other peoples' code I fork to a private repo and maintain my changes separately, and I'm fairly certain I have never starred a repo.
Stars have been useless as signals for project quality for a while. They’re mostly bought, at this point. I regularly see obviously vibe-coded nonsense projects on GitHub’s Trending page with 10,000 stars. I don’t believe 10,000 people have even cloned the repo, much less gotten any personal value from it. It’s meaningless.
I'm with you on all points except for it being bought.
Programming has long succumbed to influencer dynamics and is subject to the same critiques as any other kind of pop creation. Popular restaurants, fashion, movies - these aren't carefully crafted boundary pushing masterpieces.
Pop books are hastily written and usually derivative. Pop music is the same as is pop art. Popular podcasts and YouTube channels are usually just people hopping unprepared on a hot mic and pushing record.
Nobody is reading a PhD thesis or a scholarly journal on the bus.
The markers for the popularity of pop works are fairly independent from the quality of their content. It's the same dynamics as the popular kid at school.
So pop programming follows this exact trend. I don't know why we expect humans to behave foundationally differently here.
> Nobody is reading a PhD thesis or a scholarly journal on the bus.
As someone who is involved in academia, I can attest that most of my colleagues (including myself) do in fact read quite a few papers on buses (and trams - can't forget those)
> I'm with you on all points except for it being bought.
Stars get bought all the time. I've been around startup scene and this is basically part of the playbook now for open core model. You throw your code up on GitHub, call it open source, then buy your stars early so it looks like people care. Then charge for hosted or premium features.
There's a whole market for it too. You can literally pay for stars, forks, even fake activity. Big star count makes a project look legit at a glance, especially to investors or people who don't dig too deep. It feeds itself. More people check it out, more people star it just because others already did.
Meaningless is maybe too strong.
I have 60-ish repos, vast majority are zero star, one or two with a star or two, one with 25-ish. It’s a signal to me of interest in and usage of that project.
Doesn’t mean stars are perfect, or can’t be gamed, or anything in a universally true generalization sense. But also not meaningless.
I star repos as bookmarks. Don't know if there is another feature for that
For example, it's used as a kind of internal bookmarking system. I don't necessarily star a repo because I think it has good code, but maybe a good idea or something related to something I'm interested in developing.
Stars on GitHub have nothing to do with quality.
They are bookmarks. It is a way to bookmark a repo, and while it might correlate with quality, it isn't a measure of it.
Claude's Code dev here, and I thought I would chime in on this point to clarify why I track it at all.
When I started reading commit data, it became painfully apparent that a very large number of repos are tests, demos, or tutorials. If you have at least 1 star, that excludes most of those - unless you starred it yourself. Having 2 stars excludes the projects that are self-starred.
Starring is also quite common with my friends and colleagues as a way to find repos again later, so there is some use to it, but I agree it's not a perfect indicator of utility or quality.
It's more of a signal for investigating "did this get spammed on Reddit or Twitter", "is this new/old/weird hype", and "does this provide real value"
I've seen people "buy" stars enough not to look at them so closely. Maybe will consider whether it has 0-1 or 2-2M.
Maybe not to devs, but I've had VCs ask about them because of popularity so there you go it's a signal to someone.
Whatever reaction you have to this know that my internal reaction and yours were probably close.
Stars have always tracked attention more than quality.
It’s just way cheaper to spin up repos now — lots of these are probably one-and-done.
Probably not today, but there was a time when you could get funding based on just a github repo with a bunch of stars.
it’s my signal for popular forks