Ask HN: What is your personal opinion about GitHub stars?

Stars certainly influence how people perceive a repo. If there are no stars, then I'm less likely to look at it. The problem is that it's also a catch-22. If you have a lot of stars, more people look, and more people star. It's self fulfilling, definitely not a perfect system.

I think that would be a network effect.

I use Astral to filter/search through my starred repos

http://astralapp.com/

"Why would I do that instead of just using a browser bookmark?", I guess? Bookmarks are effectively anonymous, which I like.