> VCs explicitly use stars as sourcing signals

In my opinion, nothing could be more wrong. GitHub's own ratings are easily manipulated and measure not necessarily the quality of the project itself, but rather its Popularity. The problem is that popularity is rarely directly proportional to the quality of the project itself.

I'm building a product and I'm seeing what important is the distribution and comunication instead of the development it self.

Unfortunately, a project's popularity is often directly proportional to the communication "built" around it and inversely proportional to its actual quality. This isn't always the case, but it often is.

Moreover, adopting effective and objective project evaluation tools is quite expensive for VCs.

Vast majority of mid level experienced people take stars very seriously and they won't use anything under 100 stars.

I'm not supporting this view but it is what it is unfortunately.

VCs that invest based on stars do know something I guess or they are just bad investors.

IMO using projects based on start count is terrible engineering practice.

> measure not necessarily the quality of the project itself, but rather its Popularity

Surely a project's popularity is often related to its utility. A useful and popular project seems like exactly the kind of thing a VC might be interested in.

Well, pretty sure that VCs are more interested in popularity than in quality so maybe it's not such a bad metric for them.