1. Stars are an unreliable, easily gamed metric
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” – 3form
“A repository with zero stars has essentially no users. A repository with single‑stars has a few users, but possibly most/all are personal acquaintances of the author.” – einpoklum
Result: Star counts now reflect purchase or sybil activity more than genuine interest or quality.
2. VCs use stars as a simple, quantifiable traction signal despite the flaw
“Stars are a simple metric even someone like a VC investor can understand.” – askl
“Even when a project has thousands of stars, it may be dead‑hand‑maintained; you still have to look at real activity (issues, PRs, response times).” – dfa70
Result: Investment decisions often hinge on inflated star numbers rather than substantive evidence of adoption.
3. Reputation‑based alternatives (e.g., graph‑centric scoring) are proposed
“I wonder if there's a more graph‑oriented score that could work well here – something PageRank‑ish so that a repo scores better if it has issues reported by users who themselves have a good score.” – HighlandSpring > “A better system would be to look at how much ‘life’ issues have, opening, closing (not automatic), and response times.” – dfa70
Result: Moving beyond raw star counts toward activity‑aware or authority‑weighted scores could restore signal quality.