zlacker

>>kaeruc+(OP)
I'm surprised that Github stars are valuable enough to buy. Personally I never look at the star count because even if they were legit, they don't really tell me anything more useful than I get from looking at other things in the repo.

I tend to check the age difference between the earliest and latest commits because that lets me be sure it's not a project that someone spent a couple weeks coding up, dropped on github, and then forgot about. I'll also check the issues on there. I'm looking for more closed issues than open ones, but I'll also quickly scan over them to get a rough idea of how many are truly meaningful issues. I also get signals from the readme and docs. It's not a hard pass if there's issues with those, but it's certainly helpful to my opinion if they exist and are both clear and detailed.

>>ziml77+Kz
I'll admit I've used them. In particular, I've used paperswithcode to find implementations of ML models. There are often a number of implementations of the same model, and the quality is highly variable. I've used stars (which paperswithcode displays) as a pre-screen. Spoiler alert, the highest started implementations are not always the best. But it still helps to triage, as a proxy for how well used it is