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You can always buy GitHub stars if you need that kind of validation: https://baddhi.shop/product/buy-github-followers/

Or just remember GitHub stars are like any other kind of useless social media currency and don't mean anything.

Sure, they're just silly internet points. Yet, after heading back from the conference, they're the only immediate, tangible pat on the back that's left. It'll be a while before the first round of article citations start rolling in. So, seeing HN readers drop by the repo and leave the tiniest note by starring it did bring a few smiles to my face.

Sadly GitHub stars do have meaning to people who make decisions about which code library to add to their current project. And to people who review libraries that tackle a specific sort of problem, whose articles then get read by people who need to make decisions, etc. Such people may also use other metrics - recent activity, number of contributors, etc - to refine their judgments, but I've seen too many examples of "must have at least 1000 stars" used as the main justification for a decision. It's sad that the world is the way it is, but I doubt it will change anytime soon.

If there's one change I'd like to make to GitHub, it would be to make the value of a starring decay over time. But I'm sure even that could be gamed.

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