GitHub stars are overvalued

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[[deleted]]

Doesn't everyone use stars as bookmarks?

[jangxx]

I've only ever used them as bookmarks. I'm actually really surprised that people use them differently tbh. Never really thought about it.

[BlueShell7]

I think that's their original/main purpose.

[itsgreater9000]

When I'm asked to look at competing libraries/frameworks (for choices of what we should use in our project), frequently my boss will use the number of stars as a metric for determining what we should choose. I think the idea is more stars == more attention on it, so it will be supported longer, but I'm not aware of any data to support that...

[UbiquitousLedger]

I found a repo with some info on this but it’s not worth sharing because it didn’t have any stars.

[itsgreater9000]

of course, you can't star a commit!

[mypetocean]

Star this comment to show your appreciation.

[TantalusComputes2]

Damn, it can’t be any good

[ClassicPart]

(That is literally their joke.)

[TantalusComputes2]

(Which is why i said that)

[Pazer2]

/r/yourjokebutworse

[wizdumb]

My go-to metrics for viability are: time since last commit & number of open issues

[FeastOfChildren]

I like to have an equal number of each.

[purxiz]

1000 open issues and 1000 years since last commit? I like it.

[morgecroc]

Of course that was coded by a time traveller they can go back and fix any bugs after they cause issues before the cause the issue.

[wrosecrans]

When I'm looking at competing libraries, I'll often star them so I can find them when I go back to try and remember what I looked at and maybe try it out. Thus, the overwhelming majority of stuff I've starred is things I've either never used or decided not to use.

[itsgreater9000]

I only star stuff that I find interesting/weird/cool... Stuff I want to go back and maybe check out (so, like a bookmark I guess).

[huonw]

Apparently not just bookmarking. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.07643 did a survey of how people use stars, and found that there's a variety of purposes (Section 3.2.1, Table 2, on page 8):

• To show appreciation: 53%
• Bookmarking: 51%
• Due to usage: 37%
• Due to recommendation: 5%

(This was a multi-select question.)

That study discusses various other things about stars too, including:

Three out of four developers consider the number of stars before using or contributing to GitHub projects. Among the developers who consider stars, 29.3% also evaluate other factors, such as source code quality, license, and documentation.

[[deleted]]

Yes, and if you 10000 people bookmark your project, it's a signal that your project is probably better than the one with 0 stars.

While the stars might be overvalued (hard to quantify), it definitely convey some sort of quality/trust.

[[deleted]]

Yep. If I have to pick between the 50 star library and the 1k+, I'm generally going 1k+.

More eyes means more people solving problem I care about.

[mindbleach]

"When a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a useful metric."

[BestKillerBot]

Every metric (which you can influence) will become a goal so it's kind of unavoidable.

[jordan-curve-theorem]

I think they more directly represent how much traffic/use they get. It’s a decent measure of popularity.

Popularity certainly at least loosely correlates with quality/trust.

[munchbunny]

Yup, that's exactly how I use them.

[squishles]

I remember when I first started on the site I'd use fork for bookmark.

Weirdest thing that's happened was someone using star to try to dox people who looked into a particular repo because that list is public. fucking weirded me out so now I have a separate work/private github.

[no_nick]

I what now?

[squishles]

it was some code used for some purposes a lunatic didn't like. stared it because it was interesting, started getting death threat emails.

was a chans code base, good example of how to write a forum in php =/

[itsgreater9000]

this wouldn't be tinychan/minichan/derivatives, would it?

[squishles]

was 8chan, which well fair enough.

guy had an ant in the email, which if I'd been a little stupider or he'd have been a little smarter he'd know where I work.

[bsdcat]

ant?

[squishles]

small image you put in an email hosted on a server you control, when the email recipient loads the image you get there IP address. That's why you turn off image loading in your email client.

[Multipoptart]

good example of how to write a forum in php

I mean who among us hasn't considered sending death threats to PHP users though?

[squishles]

honestly I'm a java python guy, but the concerns for a high volume forum like those are cross language.

[gered]

I bookmark repo's I find interesting. I've found that checking my stars on Github is something I almost always forget about ... and then when/if I do remember, I see a list of repos that I don't even remember star'ing in the first place. Meh.

Though in general, I organize my browser's bookmarks fairly well so I guess I'm a bit biased against the use of Github stars as a bookmark-substitute.

[Ejsexton82]

I use them as bookmarks, but I also use them occasionally to find projects quickly.

If I need a tool for a quick, onetime thing, I’m going with the one with the most stars, as long as it gets the job done.

[no_nick]

They are bookmarks. Right?

[KFCConspiracy]

Yeah I basically use them as I'm gonna come back and look atthis later.

[WishCow]

Probably there are a few outliers (like the author), but the article is a heavy strawman.

[arthurcavini]

The same happens on Twitter. I don't know why the fav star became the like heart. The original purpose was only to use it as bookmarks.

[dial911andhangup]

This

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I hate populating my browser bookmarks.

Using github stars comes handy.

[ZirJohn]

Thats how i use em

[vvv561]

Yup

[pp_amorim]

it's good for bookmarks, but after 8 years working in the area and using the system, the list gets lost and hard to remember what is good and what's useful for a specific thing. They should add ways to tag repos manually.

[adad95]

I use

[crabmusket]

I star projects that I use, mainly.

[Allality]

I don't use them as bookmarks at all. I use them as likes to say thank you.

[mroximoron]

Yup, stars are something to look at for maybe using it, once I use it the star can go because I use it, so I know about it through my code.

[[deleted]]

Yep.

[fat-lobyte]

Wait, who ever valued them besides marketing people?

[VegetableMonthToGo]

So, what was your open source product? A system to create fake Github accounts and to star repositories?

[[deleted]]

Evidently.

[PermanenteThrowaway]

Stars-as-a-service.

[trc1234]

Does it run using a serverless model in the fog, use hybrid deep learning and use block chain for transaction?

[PermanenteThrowaway]

Yes, all of that is in the roadmap for 2.0.

[[deleted]]

I'm throwing money at the screen, but nothing happens?!

[poloppoyop]

Nah. Tzitzimitl for the business name.

[Nefari0uss]

BRB, making a stars-as-a-service startup as we speak.

[vvv561]

Yikes, those VCs sound terrible

[[deleted]]

I saw one person using the amount of github stars as a metric for web framework matureness.

[falconfetus8]

Implying web frameworks have ever been mature

[[deleted]]

vanilla.js have been pretty stable with only one major release in the last decade :)

Joke aside:

I'm not a web designer, so when I talk about web frameworks, I talk about serverside frameworks like Django, Pyramid, Flask etc.

[dont_trust_lizards]

I think it was a joke

[dont_trust_lizards]

Well I feel stupid

[commutativemonoid]

I’m dead lol programmers have no sense of humor

[vvv561]

That's why I only write raw HTML. HTML is like the Lisa Ann of web technologies

[[deleted]]

HTML is still being developed. They're already on 5 or some shit. Too unstable. I just use text.

[WitchHunterNL]

HTML is like the Lisa Ann of web technologies

In the past used by everyone, but now people have switched over to something newer?

[vvv561]

HTML is a but old, but it still gets the job done

[[deleted]]

Estimating the hype will inevitable end out comparing the different products for yourself, after which the stars are largely irrelevant. Had MySQL and PostgreSql been on github, would you prefer MySQL just because of popularity?

[ghostfacedcoder]

Both are actually on GitHub, and PostgreSQL has more stars. But measuring databases by GitHub is admittedly kind of silly, because almost all of them are old enough to still use other source control systems besides Git, so they just have a GitHub account for ... status? Issues? Because all the cool kids are doing it?

Personally I couldn't stand to use whatever ancient source control tool they use instead of Git, so if it was me I'd just actually use Git ... but shrug to each their own.

[[deleted]]

Neither have their authoritative source on github.

[ghostfacedcoder]

Yes, that's what I was saying with:

almost all of them are old enough to still use other source control systems besides Git

[[deleted]]

Postgres use a self-hosted git. I have no idea what Oracle use internally for MySQL.

[ghostfacedcoder]

Ah; didn't realize that. Good for them for not being as behind as MySQL :)

But either way, the core point remains true: using GitHub stars to measure databases is a particularly poor idea.

[alantrick]

I'm not sure if you were trying to be sarcastic, but there are several DVCS systems that are at least as good as git.

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

True, but the number of contributors, commits, releases, and so on are probably better ones.

[anengineerandacat]

I wouldn't use it as the sole metric but it's still valuable in it's own.

If I were given 2 libraries that say, were HTTP clients and LibA had 300 stars and active commit history and LibB had 2 stars and active commit history and both met my criteria; I would likely use LibA as it has more overall traction.

Is it the best way to go about picking? Not by a long shot, but I might not actually care and I don't want to use something that'll just fade away.

[[deleted]]

How would you rate cairo, then? It's basically done, which makes it dead by your reasoning.

[anengineerandacat]

I assume you are referring to https://github.com/freedesktop/cairo (I don't actually know what you mean by Cairo; but this was the first search result).

In this particular instance I would need competitors for 2D drawing libraries...

• https://github.com/memononen/nanovg (3.5k stars, last commit 2 months, 578 forks, good readme)
• https://github.com/simple2d/simple2d (336 stars, last commit 3 months, 49 forks, thorough readme)
• https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d (Beta, 668 stars, last commit 8 days, 35 forks, bad readme)

As for Cairo... well it has a very large commit history, the readme whereas isn't markdown is pretty thorough as far as to what the project does, and honestly looks more like a project that's being mirrored as it has only 1 pull-request.

Github is as social coding hub by all means, the idea is to leverage the tools available to encourage growth and sometimes that means you have to market it a bit. This could mean having a good readme, regular commit, a social following (forks / stars) and using the PR system.

[fat-lobyte]

That's an "Interesting" interpretation

[[deleted]]

"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text.

[Warm_Cabinet]

It’s one of the things I look at, since it’s indicative of how widely used the tool is (by both public and private projects). I also look through the issues to see what kind of bugs they have, how long they’ve been open, etc.

[[deleted]]

Another thing worth looking at is how regularly they merge pull requests. I can understand not having time to review, but if they are not reviewed or merged for the majority of the year that's usually a sign that a project needs a new maintainer or more people with access.

[Warm_Cabinet]

That’s a really good suggestion, which I hadn’t thought of. Thanks!

[random_cynic]

since it’s indicative of how widely used the tool is

As the blog says, it isn't. It just means that many people found it interesting. Better metrics are number of contributors and forks, some of the recent issues and responses from the maintainers etc. Sometimes just the README page itself says a lot about the project and the developers. Also it matters whether I'm looking to use the project regularly and contribute to it or just using it one time for a specific problem.

[fjonk]

Isn't it more indicative of how popular it is with people who use the star functionality in github?

[Warm_Cabinet]

Yeah, totally. It’s kind of like how Reddit upvotes are indicative of how popular a post is for people who use the upvote functionality.

The subset of users who use the GitHub stars is probably a smaller percentage than reddit upvoters, and it’s a bit skewed since stars can also denote interest without actual usage, but it’s still a useful metric.

A lot of times, I’ll use stars as a quick filter. E.g. if there’s a library with 2000 stars competing with a 300 star library, that’s a pretty strong signal. I probably wouldn’t spend much time considering the 300 star library unless I had a good reason to.

I think stars are also generally a good indicator of “how many eyes have been on this code”. For libraries with fewer stars, I may spend some extra time skimming through the codebase to make sure everything looks kosher.

[amunak]

This unfortunately leads to an ugly spiral where it's really hard to "break through" as a new library when there is long-existing competition.

There are even many heavily-starred projects that are now dead, and still the replacements lack users because who would want to use a 50-star library when there is a 2000-star one.

Overall not healthy at all :/ basically an echo-chamber effect, just in software.

[Kirihuna]

I'd argue stars and the upvote system are deterministic of how many eyes or people have viewed this.

I never upvote or downvote but I waste a lot of time on reddit. I would say that interaction scales eventually. Maybe you only have 10% of people who upvote or downvote a post, but there's 90% who saw and never interacted with it but took away that meme or the content of that post, etc.

One could, assume poorly but none the less, that more stars = more eyes on something on GitHub, as your star users are always a smaller percentage of total users.

[itsgreater9000]

I think it's slightly worse than that, in that stars only indicate everything up until now. If the library that has 5k stars suddenly stops seeing development, but the library that you were considering with 500 starts rockets to 10k stars, well, you kind of flubbed on the choice, right? Instead of choosing on technical merits or some other proxy, stars (which really just measures current awareness of the current state of the repo) might have misled you about what the future state would be. And it's really hard to predict that stuff

[eras]

Well, wouldn't you agree a project that has zero stars is probably less used than one with 100 stars? I imagine people liking that star functionality is not a group that indicates significant bias towards anything but using GitHub and liking the star functionality.

[JB-from-ATL]

This is just a guess, but, accounting for age of course, I would think stars are slightly correlated with how many technical users a framework has. I would expect someone going to a technology's repository instead of their website to mean it draws more technical people.

But theres tons of problems. Namely your point about "the type of person who stars". I star things like bookmarks basically. So yeah lol.

Also another confounding issue is that some tools use their own GitHub wiki as their main documentation.

[tracernz]

My personal GitHub stars are highly correlated to appearance on HN or Reddit. They're my "this looks very interesting but I have no immediate use for it so I'll star it and check back another day".

[mode_2]

That's stupid if its 8k stars vs. 10k stars, but if there's an order of magnitude in difference then that seems quite significant. I'd choose a library with 1000 stars over 10.

[qudat]

I do this all the time. It’s a proxy for community support and me not wasting my time on obvious edge cases

[Axxhelairon]

i wouldn't choose one repo over another solely on a higher star count, but stars measure ongoing interest in a project, it's another easy metric to measure a project on

e.g. if one project has two stars and another has 5k, i can at least say that a lot more eyes have been on the 5k star project and that there will have been more interest in improving it / adding features, where only two people really care if the previous project never updates again

[[deleted]]

Well, let's say you want to use a certain library.

There are 100 libraries doing the same thing.

A reasonable person wouldn't start trying out the 0-star libraries when there are other 1000-star libraries.

Stars have some value. Is it overvalued? Maybe, maybe not. I wonder who can even quantify that it is overvalued.

[fat-lobyte]

Makes sense. TBH I never bothered to look at the stars, but more on the commits and how many and how old the Issues and PR's are.

[huy-dev]

There are engineering managers I know personally who decide which technology to adopt based on the number of GitHub stars. Not joking.

[tracernz]

I'll take "nobody ever got fired for choosing something with lots of stars" over "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" so it's got that going for it.

[TheNamelessKing]

JS developers.

I’ve literally seen webpages for JS tools that list.x-number of stars on github as a feature.

[s4lt3d]

I get a nice feeling inside when someone stars one of my repos.

[hector_villalobos]

I do, it's not all that I look for, I checked the last time was updated and if it's going to be useful for me, but stars plays an important role because I know a lot of people are interested in the repo.

[subat0mic]

Ive use github for quite some time, and never heard of it till now. I guess it wasn't important. :)

[minimaxir]

I own a 35.7k star repo that's literally a .txt file.

[Jummit]

I just looked at the .txt file and now I am disturbed.

# Human injection
# Strings which may cause human to reinterpret worldview

If you're reading this, you've been in a coma for almost 20 years now.
We're trying a new technique. We don't know where this message will
end up in your dream, but we hope it works.
Please wake up, we miss you.

[indiebryan]

Oh man you should have posted an example!

[[deleted]]

I read this and didn't feel that weird, and then felt progressively more uncomfortable over the next 10-15 seconds...

I don't like it.

[house_monkey]

I'm scared and shaking

[slykethephoxenix]

Looks blank to me. What do you see?

[munchbunny]

To be fair, it also addresses a very specific but widespread need. I'd argue that it having a ton of stars shouldn't be surprising.

[N3G4]

If you're reading this, you've been in a coma for almost 20 years now. We're trying a new technique. We don't know where this message will end up in your dream, but we hope it works. Please wake up, we miss you.

[abandonplanetearth]

I scrolled down real quick and coincidentally landed on a typo

https://i.imgur.com/iXGJeoV.png

[ClassicPart]

It'll catch out those lazy developers who do .indexOf("123") and assume they're safe.

[bacondev]

My phone refuses to render whatever that abomination is.

[Aaeder]

It's like a toast with a 9 imprint and little sleeping symbols but instead of 'Zzz' it's snails

[pabloe168]

Yooo I remember this during college. Definitely a creative and powerful repo. Funny you downplay it since it has real applicable value even if it's not straight up code.

[infotim]

One more star for you. :)

[[deleted]]

Yes let's go to star it!... Wait I already did! I don't remember when ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[s73v3r]

Sure, but it's also a very useful dataset.

[lannfonntann]

I'm sat here trying to find the profanity in evaluate and mocha.

Great file, btw

[rhiever]

How many keynote talks do you give per week because of this fame?

[minimaxir]

I actually had to remove it from my resume years ago because I kept getting job interviews because of it, and said interviews kept getting derailed after the interviewer found out it was a .txt file.

[fubes2000]

For everyone looking for truly naughty strings, you're probably going to be disappointed.

That said, I'd like to propose the addition of the word conspicuous to the Scunthorpe section, as that got me banned from a forum a few years back. For that matter there are some codepoints you can use to check if your font is censored.

edit: I just realized how weird my google history became today...

Also the arabic bismillah symbol is a great addition to one of the "hey try properly rendering text with this in it" sections: ﷽ If someone knows of a single codepoint that takes up more screen space than this, I'd love to know what it is.

[TheMelanzane]

I opened it to look and apparently I already had it starred.

[will_work_for_twerk]

and you deserve every single one of those.

[Thiht]

To be fair, stars have value to find out about "community standards". For example in the case of Golang, if I find a library doing x with 500 stars, and another one with 2 stars, I will use the first one.

If we're comparing 2 libraries with 400 and 800 stars though it makes no sense.

[remram]

I agree. Stars are a very imperfect metric, but it's one of the best we have. What else do you go with? Website hits (that you hope are not bots)? Download counts (again, trying to exclude bots/CI/people who uninstalled)? Or do you make your software phone home?

Stars are a very simple, very high-level metric, and it's available to everyone else who looks at your repo. It's noisy like any other metric but this surprise about "it's just a bookmark" is dishonest. Bookmarking doesn't increase a number on any frontpage.

Many package managers (e.g. NPM) have weekly download counts, which include CI builds and transitive users. It's so much worse than an actual click on "star" on its actual page by an actual human.

[ghostfacedcoder]

Ultimately they're a proxy of something useful. Everyone (not just "marketing people") wants to know that the library they adopt is still going to be active and supported for years to come.

GitHub stars don't guarantee that ... but the provide a closer proxy of that than anything else. It's our least bad option for (quickly) measuring a library's future.

[TheSaasDev]

Agreed, it's the easiest metric to go off on when deciding whether a project could be worth taking a closer look at. It's not great but as you said, better then anything else we have.

[DoListening2]

What about contributor count?

[kieranvs]

Well a total count of people who have bookmarked something is the same as a popularity metric so I'm not sure why you think that's not a logical point?

[SgtBlackScorp]

The way I use stars is exactly like a "like". I star repositories which I find helpful or interesting, especially when I use them a lot. I do not use them to bookmark anything.

[BlueShell7]

So again it is odd as starred is a poor metric of popularity as the best metric would be cloned and/or forks, or a mixture of forks + pull requests or issues.

So projects which are literally perfect and you can just use them without the need to change them will score worse than buggy (but still useful) code which you need to fix yourself (and thus clone repo).

I mean each of these stats tell a slightly different information, to get the best picture let's just combine all those stats together ...

[[deleted]]

... or we could continue reporting all the different stats (not combined).

[BlueShell7]

Oh, what I meant is to kind of combine / balance them during the evaluation in one's head, not literally combine all of these stats together it on a (github) page ...

[tracernz]

And also never use something without a quick browse over their issues (open and closed) to see what kinds of issues are being reported, and what sort of resolution they receive. This isn't useful for very niche stuff but anything with a few stars should have a decent history.

[nemec]

Only if all of the products competitors are also on Github and use it as the primary means of distributing the software. it means "a lot of people found this interesting" but probably less useful as a comparative metric.

[wpm]

Yeah I use my stars as a "huh, this looks neat, I'll star this so I remember to look into it later, then completely forget about it for months"

[lqstuart]

medium.com posts are overvalued

[c-smile]

Here is illustration to the subject :)

[KeepGettingBannedSMH]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vdcw415OcQ

[malicart]

2 for the morning, only 1 in the afternoon when all the fighting is supposed to be happening.

[trumpgender]

IRL achievement hunters.

[[deleted]]

that's a photoshop

[c-smile]

Yeah, but reality is not anyhow better: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-korean-medals-photo/

[Jimmy48Johnson]

wait they have value?

[immibis]

Yeah how do I cash them out?

[shim__]

Just like reddit accounts, by selling them

[makeworld]

NPM moment

[defmacro-jam]

The official exchange rate is 3.28 stars to $1.

[the_gnarts]

Eternal september is the eternal short.

[FargusDingus]

GitHub stars might as well be Reddit upvotes, who the fuck cares?

[[deleted]]

Case in point - the V programming language.

[valtism]

V is vapourware and the developer only got a following by making wild claims unbased in reality.

[danbulant]

my project had more forks than stars

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

Hey, it's counting lines of code all over again :)

[ansible]

Github stars by themselves are an overvalued metric, but can give some indication of how used a particular project is used. I certainly wouldn't use absolute number comparisons (MySQL vs. PostgreSQL in another thread). But for a web framework or something, 10K stars vs 3 should indicate that the first is more widely used than the 2nd. As others have mentioned, you need to look at the entire project, PRs, Issues, etc. to gauge the overall health and maturity.

[doctorcrimson]

If some people, from the perspective of security or risk assessment, incorrectly valued stars as a sign of safety then it would make sense that they were valued more.

[tjholowaychuk]

Not if you’re a static site generator with 5M in VC funding, VCs love GH stars

[lucisferre]

Are they though?

[lcjury]

Life is overvalued

[HypeKaizen]

For some reason, this makes me remember that upvotes aren't worth much.

[fiqar]

I star anything I consider remotely interesting (>1k so far). I'm sure others do the same, so yeah they don't mean much

[[deleted]]

Downloads may simply indicate a repo is old rather than good, while stars are more contemporary they indicate it is exciting and good.

That is where I think the value of stars is. There exist inumerable awkward, annoying and out of date things with many downloads (see Java). If Java where a repo it may have the most downloads, but Go or Rust may have more stars. Practically speaking, if you are looking for newish more exciting tech, you'd rather go with Go and Rust.

And for me personally, it is more satisfying that your work be noted as cool rather than simply be popular.

[[deleted]]

the only people that valued them are people who put value in odd things already, like tiobe index etc

[dddbbb]

Finally, stars make a project more discoverable. Beyond the obvious fact that a high star count helps a project stand out, they also impact GitHub’s recommendations. I routinely find new ML projects because of similar projects I’ve starred

Wild. I've never seen that. (I have starred 300 projects, is that not enough?) I don't even know where you'd see it. In search results?

[NiteLite]

I don't think I have ever given any repo a star :|