I recently read How the Internet Happened by Brian McCullough, and found it fascinating and quite entertaining. I strongly recommend it. One thing that really stood out to me was the amount of investors unable to understand the market being created in front of their eyes, and coming up with some ridiculous notions of what made a company valuable.
Fast forward to today’s open source landscape, and I think we’re repeating the same mistake. This time with GitHub stars.
GitHub stars are a low friction signal of interest. They tell us that someone, somewhere, thought a project was worth saving. But at some point, stars became more than bookmarks. They became metrics. Metrics used in pitch decks. In investment decisions. In Twitter flexes and conference talks.
How did we get here? The answer is simple: GitHub stars are public, easy to understand, hard to manipulate, and visible to everyone, including investors. They can’t be hidden behind pitch decks. They don’t require API access or self-reported figures. In a landscape where early stage open source projects often lack detailed user analytics or revenue models, stars provide a confident, convenient signal of traction.
But I think it’s a false confidence. Because a GitHub star doesn’t mean usage. It doesn’t mean the project works at scale. It doesn’t mean anyone is paying for it. In many cases, the starrer never even cloned the repo. They might’ve just liked the branding.
And yet, GitHub stars continue to be held up as a proxy for product market fit, especially for open source projects aiming for a monetisation model. Worse, they’re being held up by the very project itself as a sign of success.
That’s the problem. When stars become the metric, behaviour follows. Projects get optimised for virality instead of reliability. Readmes become marketing pages. Logos get A/B tested. Maintainers spend more time on launch strategy than on maintenance. Founders chase popularity, not sustainability.
This isn’t to say GitHub stars are meaningless. They’re just one signal and they’re a helpful one in the right context. But in practice, they’re too often overemphasised, treated as a replacement for real indicators of success like:
- Active deployments
- Contributor velocity
- Issue resolution
- Community engagement
- Revenue or commercial adoption
The good news? We’re starting to see better tooling. Projects like OpenSauced, Scarf, Orbit, and Bitergia give us richer community insights. But more importantly, we need a cultural shift. One that values real engagement, not just surface level signals.
Because a GitHub star is a compliment, not a commitment.
And if you’re building an open source business, you need the latter.