The real revelation here is that people take this kind of Imaginary Internet Points seriously enough that there's a tool to algorithmically assess the quality of a project's GitHub stars[0].
Like: what?
Stars are basically the laziest possible way of doing anything with a repo besides looking at it. What possible signal of any value could anyone possibly hope to discern from a repo's star count? And yet not only is there an economy of counterfeit stars (flares? c.f. pieces of flair, which are equally meaningless. Also, the budget ones are ephemeral, just like a road flare), there are people who care so much about stars and flares that there's a whole 'nother economy behind discerning which are which.
If I have a choice of two pieces of software I am definitely using the one with the most stars first. I never considered that authors might have paid for stars.
I wonder, when you go to StackOverflow, if you would start by checking answers at the bottom since votes are so meaningless?
> I wonder, when you go to StackOverflow, if you would start by checking answers at the bottom since votes are so meaningless?
I usually read from top down to the point where the answers get to a "have you tried sticking a fork in your toaster?" levels of bad if I don't already have enough domain knowledge to know whether an answer is good for myself. It's frequently of value to me to know what the wrong way of doing something is so that I don't inadvertently go down that road myself.
It's also lower effort to read a stackoverflow answer before voting. I have greater confidence that the person voting may have actually read the answer than that a person starring a repo us actually looked at even the first bit of code.
Like: what?
Stars are basically the laziest possible way of doing anything with a repo besides looking at it. What possible signal of any value could anyone possibly hope to discern from a repo's star count? And yet not only is there an economy of counterfeit stars (flares? c.f. pieces of flair, which are equally meaningless. Also, the budget ones are ephemeral, just like a road flare), there are people who care so much about stars and flares that there's a whole 'nother economy behind discerning which are which.
Mind. Blown.
[0] Astronomer, mentioned in TFA https://github.com/Ullaakut/astronomer