If I want to use a repository, my first step is to either download a released binary or clone the repository. Forking is much further down the line for me, when I've used the code, encountered a problem, fixed it, and decided to polish the fix up to make a PR. I star something when I either have used it and like it, or when I think I want to use it in the future and want to bookmark it (though the former more often than the latter). I have given out about 50% more stars than I've forked, and have probably cloned an order of magnitude more than I've forked or starred.

Of course not everyone is the same, but I'd be surprised if overall clones were less than an order of magnitude more than forks or stars, and find two or even three orders of magnitude believable depending on the target group of the repo.

Exactly. I would add that the number of clones (not forks) and file/page views is viewable only by the owner of the repo, so we can only guess. (If you own a github repo, you can see the most recent number of clones and page views by clicking on insight -> traffic.)

My estimate of "one to two orders of magnitude" is based on anecdotal evidence. I edited my comment to reflect as much.

I checked my 5 year old repository of ~300 stars. It has a ~100 unique clones a month. So if the average was half of it then the 1 order of magnitude would be quite an accurate approximation.

I think the biggest difference with a clone and a star is that a star requires an account and some vested interest in the social network of Github. Anyone who is not interested in the social aspect can just bookmark it.

I guess this differs quite a lot by target demographic. A tool for GPT will probably get a lot more stars than a plugin for some consumer software simply because it is more targeted for the audience of people who have Github accounts.

Thank you for sharing your anecdata. In my experience, the number of clones per month is much higher at first, and then decays gradually until it settles into a stable run-rate, so it's likely that you've had more than 100 x 12 x 5 clones over those five years -- i.e., between one and two orders of magnitude the number of stars, 300.

Another data point: icdiff is 13y old with 4k stars and 200 unique clones in the past month.

(This is a tool that most people install and run without any interaction with GitHub, since it is in package managers)

> I think the biggest difference with a clone and a star is that a star requires an account and some vested interest in the social network of Github.

Agreed, but that also means you may be getting multiple clones from the same person/organisation, which artificially inflates the number.

How many projects have you starred and how many have you cloned?

Whilst starring is simpler, the incentive is much lower than that of cloning. Especially for projects you just want to use and not contribute to or follow.

In my many years of work, i have only starred less than 50 repos. I am sure i have cloned more than a thousand.

> How many projects have you starred and how many have you cloned?

I seldom star, but neither you nor I can be extrapolated to the general community. I have thousands of stars in some repos, and I know a significant number of those users don’t even code, let alone clone repos or copy code, they’re interested in the final product. They have GitHub accounts because it’s the way to report bugs or make feature requests.

The OP made a claim. All I’m looking to understand is if it has data backing it up or it’s just a gut feeling, because if it’s the former I’ll have learned something and made a correction of my mental model of the world. Sharing more anecdotes will leave us stuck in the same situation.

Some repos have code that 'phones home' when run. For example, checking for updates or security vulnerabilities.

By checking the usage statistics on that server, you can get an idea how many users there are, and typically it's far higher than the number of stars.

That just tells us that more people use the code than star the repo. I don’t think that’d be a surprise to anyone. The claim was that more people clone and copy code from the repo than the ones who star it, which is a different matter from the number of users.

Thank you for clarifying. I meant use. The number of clones and the number of file/page views are proxies for that. So is the number of installs via pip, conda, and other Python package management systems, in this case. I updated my comment to reflect as much.

I've stared maybe 2-3 repositories over the past 15 years, contributed to probably a half dozen and used hundreds (if not more) in my applications. To me using means using that project in an application you develop. Typically I get them from NPM or Nuget and I contribute when a) the project owner thinks my feature idea is a good idea or b) I run into a bug that I can fix.

Starring is just not that useful to me so I can see why users or contributors would be much higher. I typically star repos if it's an unpopular or old repository that doesn't have NPM or Nuget packages.