I often notice interesting but not very useful projects getting a lot of stars because they generated some discussion on HN. I think reviews would be better. I've used the reviews, both the number of reviews and the average, on the WordPress Plugin Directory to decide what plugin to install, and find them to be reasonably accurate. Something like this for other platforms besides WP would be great.

This is definitely true. My SubredditSimulator repo has 433 stars: https://github.com/Deimos/SubredditSimulator

That's not an incredibly high number, but it's still a pretty good amount. Despite that, in over 3 years, it has never had a real issue submitted, never had a single pull request, and as far as I know there isn't even another instance of the code running anywhere. So it certainly doesn't seem to be a "useful" project to anyone else by any measure, and the stars came entirely from attention on HN/reddit/etc. without any connection to whether that repo actually has any value to anyone.

Do stars really "help" that much? This sort of reads like projection more than anything.

I think it does kind of in the way they say, but the real issue is that github has been a frozen project for like a decade. It's terrible at sorting, aggregation, ranking, sharing, and recovery of interesting things. It barely extends the existing git features. I'm not going to hold my breath for MS to make it actually better, but I am 100% certain that the inertia of open source projects would be greatly helped by a thoughtful way to just do and display basic tagging and project exploration history.

Yes I know github tags exist (and git tags and branches), and I've found things that I wouldn't of found otherwise, but personal and maybe color coded tagging of my own stars and forks. Maybe a view timelines of my own exploration and groups them by the stats created by other people's tags. To say nothing of producing a feed that was even just a rip off of 2005 facebook's wall with accessory discussion. This could totally still be kept in repo if need be.

Long story long, stars is all we got. They suck. So do forks. It's probably not going to improve when it merges with Skype. What are we doing next?

Have you signed up to the Dashboard beta ?

There are some discovery elements to it. It's definitely an area they should improve in but I am not sure necessarily how many people are looking to discover new open source projects.

I haven't! I guess I should check that out.

Really on the projects? Because I look at dozens weekly. Finding "that thing I saw that one time" is more often than not a painfully futile exercise on github. I can usually suss it out via google, but I think that says all I'm trying to say right there.

As someone who has published a few different open source projects as the primary (or sole) contributor, the stars actually do make a difference.

It gives me an extra bit of motivation to maintain or improve the project if I see acknowledgement from others that they've used the it and it helped them.

Of course I'd rather see forks and pull requests, but stars are certainly still a motivating factor.

Sometimes on the github activity feed I see a "friend" staring a project and I just want to say "No, don't use that. It is obsolete. Use this other-thing instead".

But giving feedback like that isn't possible, unless you do it via email/chat.

The article explains why they help. Stars (upvotes, likes, etc.) are metrics, and metrics allow computers and people to know where to put their attention.

Metrics help computers decide what to show you when N is very large. For social networks (this doesn't exclude Github, by the way), metrics are pivotal in determining how much attention certain content gets. Content with more attention in turn gets more feedback, which can help it get even more attention.

Then there's the subconscious effect that metrics have on individuals. Content with many likes, upvotes or stars are generally seen to be "more important" than their counterparts because they are validated by other people.

Countless times, I've chosen one instance of a module simply because it had more stars and activity than a nearly identical module.

TLDR: Those simple numbers are used in more ways than you'd think, and they have non-trivial consequences in the world.

It is indeed a metric, but it's never once been a metric that I've used when considering github projects.

To me, important metrics are:

1. Project maintenance -- when were the last commits and how important were they?

2. Issue tracking -- how active are the maintainers in covering issues?

3. Actual code/test quality

As far as stars go, I've only ever looked at them as the number of people who decided to "like" something, but that's never a factor in my consideration since I don't know when or why they did it, whereas the other three things I listed are much, much more direct ways of viewing the overall "health" and usefulness of a project.

My perspective is apparently an unusual one, though, which is why I wanted to ask and make sure I was understanding the linked article properly.

> My perspective is apparently an unusual one

It's not unusual, it's just very high-effort and it makes no sense to ignore stars when N is large. In other words, when time is limited, low-resolution information becomes very valuable.

> As far as stars go, I've only ever looked at them as the number of people who decided to "like" something, but that's never a factor in my consideration

You might think this, but I am skeptical. For example, if you had to review hundreds of projects and you only had time to run your fair, thoughtful analysis on 10 of them, you would effectively be forced to look at stars to sort the list before processing it, as it's the next-best metric for judging a project.

This is the same reason why job and college applications go through shallow sorting methods before they are reviewed by humans. You might initially think that GPA, years of experience, and other numerical metrics are shallow and do not tell you anything about somebody, but they are very useful when you have tens of thousands of applicants and you need to filter the list down to hundreds.

My point is that sometimes you need to lower the resolution of your analysis because you don't have a lot of time. In practice, most people (and even computers) don't have time to look at everything, so they use any useful information they can find (whether it's conscious or not). I like to think that the number of points on an HN post doesn't affect my probability of reading the article, but if I took the data and did the analysis, I'd probably find that isn't the case and that I am biased towards spending my limited time on posts with more points.

Personally I use the stars as a kind of bookmarking system, rather than purely a like system, given they reside and are searchable in the starred section of one's profile. I'll link a project to others if I find it useful.

If I've created something I usually appreciate written praise/thanks from users and peers more but I also understand how even little gestures can make a difference.

I have a project with over 2000 stars[1], but I don't maintain it any more and it's not indicative of how I code at the moment. I guess it's nice to have, but what really is the worth of the stars?

[1]https://github.com/minikomi/Bootstrap-Form-Builder

edit: and, 1060 forks..

This type of problem falls on what I call the "conversion" problem.

Having a customer where I did some work with e-mail campaigns with several products and different populations, it was almost constant for these values:

10-15% open the e-mail.

1-3% Convert or create an action.

And I do extrapolate these numbers for the whole population. It come to be the 1-3% that "do something" and that 10-15% who reads and leave for later.

Parents and teaching meeting? 10-15% will think about going...1-3% will go and take some action (volunteer, raise). Same on other activities. I am not blaming or judging, but we can't always be on 1-3% every time all the time.

So expect 1-2% of visitors giving stars for you.

Maybe I'm weird, but stars are never a motivation in themselves. They show someone may be using the project, but that's it. Admittedly I haven't received many star ratings, but even a single issue filed is more motivating than all the stars I ever got.

It’s crazy how stars can really boost ones career.

I don't star projects if they help me or if I use them. I star if I like them.