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Comment by cvoss | Hacker News Reader

I've never once starred a GH project, nor ever looked at or considered the star count of a project in order to evaluate it. What do people actually use this metric for? (This is not a rhetorical question. If you use it, I'd like to know why/how.)

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Starring projects is how I “bookmark” them so I can easily find them later. A high number of stars indicates many devs are interested in the project… if I had to chose a UI library with 10 stars versus one with 30,000 stars, it should be obvious why you’d pick the later. More interest likely means a bigger community behind the product.

When I'm looking for a library I'll consider them in order of # of stars.

e.g. I might search for "TypeScript ORM", open five popular repos, and then compare the two libraries with the most stars to make my decision.

I also use stars to bookmark projects, and I'll usually unstar a project once I've tried it out/no longer need it.

I star repos as a way to bookmark them. I use the star counts as a rough metric for how popular a repo is. Something with a high star count will tend to have a larger community, more support, documentation, etc. Not always the case, but it can be a useful heuristic.

When repos are mirrored to github (so the commits aren't directly made by your account), your contributions to those mirrored repos aren't listed on your profile unless you star the repo.

So i star repos that are developed outside github so my contributions show up on my profile.

How do you bookmark projects at GitHub? Basically, it is not the same a library with less than 10 stars than some popular ones with ten of thousands. It is true that you can game the system butnstats are a signal in a domain that you don't know well.

I like to keep track of interesting projects. It's basically just a bookmark for me.

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