I think people expect the star system to be a cheap proxy for "this is a reliable piece of sorfware which has a good quality and a lot of eyes".

I think as a proxy it fails completely: astroturfing aside stars don't guarantee popularity (and I bet the correlation is very weak, a lot of very fundamental system libraries have small number of stars). Stars also don't guarantee the quality.

And given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy. I'm teaching myself to skip the stars and skim through the code and evaluate the quality of both architecture and implementation. And I found that quite a few times I prefer a less-"starry" alternative after looking directly at the repo content.

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onion2k 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

given that you can read the code, stars seem to be a completely pointless proxy

Imagine you're choosing between 3 different alternatives, and each is 100,000 LOC. Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy.

Stars isn't a good one because it's an untrusted source. Something like a referral would be much better, but in a space where your network doesn't have much knowledge a proxy like stars is the only option.

	▲	ernst_klim 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Is 'reading the code' really an option? You need a proxy. 100k is small, but you're right, it can be millions. I usually skim through the code tho, and it's not that hard. I don't need to fully read and understand the code. What I look at is: high-level architecture (is there any, is it modular or one big lump of code, how modular it is, what kind of modules and components it has and how they interact), code quality (structuring, naming, aesthetics), bus factor (how many people contribute and understand the code base).
	▲	hgoel 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I don't think I have ever even considered using star count as a factor for picking from alternatives. Looking at the commit history, closed vs open issues and pull requests provides a much more useful signal if you can't decide from the code.
	▲	readthedangcode 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ask Claude to help. Read the dang code. You'll be more confident in your decision and better positioned to handle any issues you encounter.

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lukan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The issues page used to be good for this as well. What kind of problems people are having.

(Sometimes still is, but the agents garbage does not help)

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cortesoft an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The VCs looking to invest would naturally care more about popularity than quality, because popularity would be how you make sales.