GitHub stars inflation
Here is what I’m talking about:
All these examples use a project called star-history.
I saw an explanation from the author of this project that the idea is to provide the audience with a metric about how many stars a particular project have collected over time, which can indicate how active the project is.
I can’t find this statement anymore.
Stars as trust currency
During my time with GitHub I perceived stars as some form of currency. I didn’t star every project I liked or read about on the internet because I wanted to make sure the value of stars is distributed fairly.
This might not be the case for other people. One of the use cases I’m aware of is using stars and bookmarks for interesting projects.
Nevertheless, both cases show the interest in a particular project from computer hackers, programmers and admins.
If enough interest is paid from this group, anyone else could assume with high certainty - the project is popular, active, interesting, working.
It, of course, never was a 100% accurate validation.
Inflation moment
: this picture is taken from star-history readme file
Due to recent developments in the tech industry, software engineering has become an easy entry area. It is still difficult to master as any other area but you can now make a simple web site in a minute instead of reading tons of docs and remembering every HTML tag.
The audience of people and bots who can write programs has broadened significantly.
To some degree this situation can be viewed as a form of asset bubble.
The supply of stars increased very quickly.
The number of people who can star increased as well.
The most attractive repos (from the new audience perspective) got tons of stars now.
The “hottest” repos capture most of the stars without necessarily increasing the value their produce.
The disconnected between a repo’s value and the number of stars is increasing.
The number of stars is changing meaning. It’s now a popularity signal mostly rather than anything else. Popularity at a particular time I should say. Stars almost never taken away and the project that collected tons of them can become inactive the next day but the number of stars will stay with it forever.
What the stars rating is currently showing is when the project was posted on Hacker News or similar places.
What to do
It is hard to trust this stars-metric now.
I now pay more attention to open and closed issues, the discussion inside of those
issues. Forum/chat of the project where community is gathering.
The number of pull requests is maybe a good metric too although less trustworthy nowadays.
The number of sponsors can be a good one.
These were the places to look at anyway but now they has become more valuable.
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