Why I stopped caring about GitHub stars

GitHub stars feel like a scoreboard, and for my first year publishing code, I played that game: promoting repos, watching numbers, treating attention as validation. Then I looked at which of my projects actually mattered — and the correlation with stars was nearly zero.

What stars actually measure

A click. One. Not usage, not retention, not whether a single person ever ran the code. Trending pages, listicles, and one good screenshot can move stars more than a year of solid maintenance. Stars measure that the repository was seen.

What I track instead

• clones and downloads — the closest thing to actual use
• issues opened by strangers — people only file issues on software they depend on
• the emails and messages — "we use this in production" from one real team outweighs a thousand stars
• whether I still maintain it — a live small project beats an abandoned popular one

The reframe that freed me

A star is a candidate. A user is a relationship. Optimising for candidates made me build demos; optimising for users made me build tools. The stars followed the useful projects eventually — slowly, honestly — but they were never the goal that made the work good. Build for the person who needs it on a Tuesday. They never star anything; they just rely on you.