I didn’t really get the impression here that Jared wanted a social network. He just wanted a better mechanism for discovering good quality and interesting projects. Popularity is often one good signal.
And I think the Web Development community could do with a decent break from "new" as well. What would be great is if we could just prune some of the gajillion frameworks and libraries already out there, and spend some time to make the ones we keep decently robust and elegant.
- a like ("I want to let the creator know I like this.")
- a share ("I want my followers to know about this.")
- a bookmark ("I want to be able to find this again later.")
Most social networks only have the first two. GitHub, even worse, only has one. (I personally use stars exclusively as bookmarks, btw.)
I wouldn't "like" project that are broken or half done, but I star it if it can solve my problem.
On the other side, when somebody stars my project I will invest more energy into it because I see that it is useful to somebody else, not just me. Most of my projects are sparsely tested, because usually I'm the only user and it is not mission-critical. When it's broken I usually know where. When I see starts appearing on my project I add more tests and handle edge cases better, so new users have a better experience. If they would only bookmark it, I wouldn't know if somebody wants to use my software. And they would also have a bad experience, and maybe drop it after evaluating as a piece of crap.