From personal experience and from reading the other comments, some people see open source as a popularity contest and more stars will get you more users (which in turn gets you more stars).
Choosing one library over another just because it has more stars is bad decision making.
Consider choosing a command line tool for making http requests. If you consider GitHub stars:
- curl has 24.7k stars
- httpie has 4.3k stars as of writing this
- wget only has a mirror on GitHub with 264 stars
Does this mean wget is a bad tool? Does it mean httpie used to be vastly superior to curl with over 2x the amount of stars? I don't think you can really say anything meaningful about these projects based on the amount of stars, especially relatively to each other. Except for how many people clicked on the star button.
Choosing one library over another just because it has more stars is bad decision making.
Consider choosing a command line tool for making http requests. If you consider GitHub stars: - curl has 24.7k stars - httpie has 4.3k stars as of writing this - wget only has a mirror on GitHub with 264 stars
Does this mean wget is a bad tool? Does it mean httpie used to be vastly superior to curl with over 2x the amount of stars? I don't think you can really say anything meaningful about these projects based on the amount of stars, especially relatively to each other. Except for how many people clicked on the star button.