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Why care? Stars don't mean anything, save for the few people who organise the software they use by starring it.

Certainly it's not a community owned by the maintainers. I don't own a connection with the people that upvoted this post, and stars mean exactly the same (effectively nothing).

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Of course if GitHub were only a service for cloud hosting of Git repositories, it would be totally irrelevant whether or not the repository was marked private for 30 minutes.

But GitHub, by design, seeks to be as much of a social network as a repository hosting service and people take the stars very seriously. I’ve seen many CVs that brag about the candidate’s star counts.

>GitHub, by design, seeks to be as much of a social network

This is so true - not sure why it isn't getting talked about more - they even have a feed now [which is getting better every few days]

This change also clears out watchers. I was watching the repo to be notified of new releases (and security updates) and that was wiped out as part of this mistake.

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