Poll: Do you use GitHub stars for bookmarking or for “Liking”?

Bookmarking is liking. Bookmarking means "I like this and I want to look closer at it later when I have the time" to me.

Both

Good point, almost like an "I approve for use" type of situation, I began using Watch for a while but didn't seem to get the same notifications. I do however wish there was some alternative view to your star(ed) collection (breakup by tech/domain) because you can't really organize. Something similar to explore (https://github.com/explore) but your own items based from what you have approved.

Primarily bookmarking. I just really wish you could create categories for your own stars (similar to how you can create your own playlists on YouTube for example), because it's really annoying having everything from "just something fun" to "actually useful for work" in just one big star pile that you can barely do anything about.

Both

There should be a "Both" option IMHO

I'm using astralapp.com, which is a nice application for viewing, searching and tagging my favs.

Bookmarking, for liking, i "Watch"

Interesting poll. I can only imagine you have a use case for building something. I'm in the same boat.

If anybody is interested on working on a Github star related project with me, let me know. It'll have a huge impact on how individuals use Github. I intend on this being for-profit with Stripe payments.

I've been working on it in stealth as my pet project but it's closing in on being publicly available.

It uses Laravel 4.2, MySQL, supervisord, and beanstalkd for those interested.

Contact info in my profile.

I feel stupid. I never even thought of it as a bookmarking tool. When I have to bookmark, I just bookmark the repo page in the browser. I never thought of GitHub stars as anything more than a "Kudos, Good job" tool.

None. I never click on stars.

Projects that I care about have developer mailing lists, and mailing lists where people review and discuss patches. I subscribe to those.

Projects that don't have that and only rely on GitHub are toy/non-serious projects that I don't care about.

For bookmarking I have actual bookmarks.

Mostly for bookmarking.

I mainly use it as a like button, but if I'm really interested by a project I might instead start Watching it.

I use it for liking, interesting to read that it can be used for bookmarking

I use it for liking, interesting to read that it can be used for bookmarking

I voted for bookmarking, but I use it for a bit of both, confusingly.

I feel like what I'm missing is some sort of mechanism for privately bookmarking repositories, perhaps with optional tagging or personal notes. I usually star a repo with a particular purpose in mind, e.g. "oh this could be an interesting way to solve problem X at work" or "ah finally, an MIT-licensed alternative to Project Y". As it stands, there's not really any good way to store that kind of info.

(On a related note, I don't really like the fact that your starred repos can't be made private.)

I rarely can keep up with/remember bookmarks so I usually will fork a repo that I "like", even if I dont do anything with the code. This may not work for everyone, but in my case seeing it in my repo list happens much more frequently than visiting my list of bookmarks.

I've replied to someones comment with this already, I think it deserves more attention though. For those of you using Stars for bookmarking check out http://astralapp.com/ for organisational purposes.

Both, really. I like this enough to look at it again when I have time.

I rarely "watch" a project however.

bookmarking +1 I use https://github.com/Sliim/helm-github-stars to browse my stars

Bookmarking

Bookmarking

Both, but I will watch a repo if it's more for bookmarking something I plan to use.

Isn't it really the same?

If you bookmark something then you are ultimately thinking that at least it is worthy your attention, hence, liking?

For liking / encouraging the author to continue development. I'd use the browser bookmarks or my wiki for bookmarking things instead.