Once you start trying to make a living from anything you do online, you start to realize that literally everything on the internet is gamed to extreme. Even this article was written and posted here for a reason.

If your GitHub repo can in any way provide you with income (from just having something to talk about in an interview or an innocuous “buy me a coffee link”…all the way up to selling $100,000/yr enterprise support plans), you now have a strong incentive to game the system.

And if it’s allowed by the system, then it’s a prisoners dilemma. Because if you DON’T do it, your competition will do it and eat your lunch.

That’s why it’s so important to design high integrity ranking systems.

Github really wants to be a social network or something to that effect and I get the feeling that most developer don't care. If you log in it's pretty clear that the "front page" is suppose to be something like a feed, but I don't know anyone who uses it. Mine is completely blank and pointless. Stars I suppose is to be something akin to a like, maybe.

I have plenty of Github projects bookmarked, but I never "stared" one... Why would I?

My only guesses are people showing popular repos for their CV or to appear legitimate to get access to another repo like what happened with the xz utils backdoor.

There's also the third category of projects receiving funding.

And for a while startups were using it as a traction metric for open core projects when pitching to VCs.

The "like" metric is dumbed-down to self-amplifying popularity that hovers around meaninglessness. It would be more valuable to weight things based who else you respect also rate a particular item.