Ask HN: Why do you star GitHub repos?

8 points by mrjoelkemp ↗ HN
Serious question. Issuing a star means different things to different people: bookmarking, encouraging, doing a favor for a friend, publicizing, and more I'm sure.

Why do you star?

7 comments

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80% bookmarking / 20% love (same with my Twitter favs)
Many reasons.

- Something that is of interest to me. May be I will use it sometime in future on my own project. For example, I have bookmarked wyswig editors (summernote) built using bootstrap. Might use them in future.

- Frameworks that I work with. E.g. Flask. Want to keep an eye on latest updates, issues, resolutions, patches etc.

- A developer/person that I want to follow. I star their repo that is most relevant to me.

A mark that I trust and I am interested in the project. In the aggregate, it demonstrates the reliability and trustworthiness of the project. To me, A healthy number of stars/follows/forks (along with recent commits) proclaims that I needn't hesitate to use the product of that repo in my projects. Starring is to partly pass on that favor, to share my knowledge of what works and what doesn't.
Encouragement, mostly. My way of saying, "I can tell a lot of effort went into this. Thanks for putting it together."