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Comment by goodpoint | Hacker News Reader

Stars are very much unrelated to quality and impact of a project.

Case in point: the top 20 starred projects include joke projects, "awesome" lists and some javascript stuff.

It's probably also easy to buy stars.

Yeah they’re a rough universal indicator. Unless you can mention a better one that’s just as simple I don’t think the counterpoint you’re making is very strong.

> Unless you can mention a better one that’s just as simple

No. You can't judge a book by the cover and there's no point in complaining that people should give you a better metric "that’s just as simple".

You can't judge a book by its cover. But when you have to judge an extremely large amounts of books, then you have to start introducing some metrics to help narrow them down.

Nobody's complaining, I'm simply saying your criticism is weak. Stars aren't perfect but they're better than anything else for a rough estimate.

I'm not sure what your point is. Stars are decent indictor when comparing two projects in the same category.

No they are not.

Can you give an example where the star count is misleading?

I don't think I have ever seen a repo with 3x the number of stars be less reputable than a similar repo (same language / target audience).

It is relative to other tools in the same space and beyond a point it is meaningless.

I.e. I would be happy to find a library with 100 stars in say elixir and similar threshold would be say few thousands in JavaScript.

Beyond 10-20k it is just popularity. It is meaningless whether vue or react is more popular.

Also it is only one indicator between choosing libraries, how many active contributors, how many closed and open issues , when was the last release also matters as well.

Bottom line is you try to avoid something very few people use or only one guy is developing

For many projects it's just a measure on how much advertising on social networks the authors are doing.

That isn’t necessarily bad. Ability to engage community in any form is important, and it helps to know they are serious to spend time and effort building out the network.

People don’t buy IBM or Microsoft because they are the best, it is because of their commitment to support and maintain the product. It is similar with GitHub projects

A good chunk of open source comes from corporate support directly, whether old school IBM or Facebook /google of the world.

Companies influence what gets developed when, even kernel development is largely corporate funded. social network motives seem a bit more benign than say how oracle runs MySQL

> Ability to engage community in any form is important

When projects are riding the hype wave and getting popularized by reddit or HN it's not a proof of commitment. On the contrary, it takes more commitment to maintain a project that is not hype-driven.

There's already too much churn and focusing developer's effort on developing the hot new thing of the week to be github-famous is harmful.

Not every project is covered in HN/reddit. Social media impact is not feasible for every project. Some distortion shouldn't mean discard it for all projects. Staring on GitHub is slightly higher effort than say to like on Twitter/Instagram etc.

There are plenty of projects that I have used after seeing here, and say opened few issues or even made a MR or two.

Riding the social media wave is first step to getting users, issue responsiveness, project maturity all make a difference.

1000 star, 100 use , 10 create issues, 1 contributes. More eye balls in general can improve project quality. The maintainers have to be responsive yes, but that really is visible only with more exposure.

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