People just use stars in completely different ways such that the information that someone starred something ends up being basically pointless. E.g. people star stuff just because they want to look at them later and having a public link to these profiles isn't really reflecting their relationship with them. I know multiple users (myself included) who were pretty surprised when they first learned that this is all visible.
Of course instead of hiding the stars it might be better to add a private similar feature instead...
Anyway the whole "sharing the development experience" features in GitHub are IMO mostly weird. I'm using GitHub to develop open source software, not because I'm looking for another social network.
We star because we like the code, the idea, the execution and the maybe the impact of the project. And it's encouragement. You star a project you pushing it forward. This is the human experience. We are not machines worshiping code. We care about what others think and this is why github is different.
> Of course instead of hiding the stars it might be better to add a private similar feature instead.
Agreed. Hiding means giving more space to anonymous users do we want that?
> I'm using GitHub to develop open source software.
Same. And i am not coding for myself i also need other to be part of what i am building and that's supposed to be part of the mission. Increase interactively. Instead this feature does the opposite.
I use stars as bookmarks, no more than that.
Hint: This is the culture I need github to promote. Giving back to the community.