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.
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.