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> stars on GitHub - they're not an expression of appreciation for the project, they're just bookmarks

Project maintainers often don’t think so. I think they should be just bookmarks and not a measure of popularity, better to hide the number of stars. It’d hopefully make some maintainers more humble and helpful. Maybe!




They are really good to understand whether project is used by enough folks for it to be validated and most likely maintained.


Isn’t that what the commit dates are for? Or the issue list?


Amount of issues to infer how much library gets used? That might work, but it feels like amount of issues would depend very much on the complexity of the library itself. It would be great if this number was also on the main page then and it would be possible to sort by that, but it still feels iffy to use that.

And maybe in some cases you would like to know amount of issues per amount of stars.

With issue count if it's a simpler type of library you would imagine there are quite few issues, but you'd still like to know whether this library is validated by enough folks. If it has plenty of stars and very few issues, this seems to be indicative of a very good option.

Ideally you look at all signals, also download counts from packagist/other managers as well.

I just don't think it would be a valid idea to remove the star count in an attempt to make some folks more humbler. I doubt it would make maintainers more helpful.




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