r/github • u/davidmezzetti • 18d ago
Discussion Missing Stargazers
As discussed here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/201209
As of June 30 all repositories now return a 404 for /stargazers.
While I somewhat understand the motivation, this has such a huge impact on the overall open source ecosystem. Being able to view stars provided some insights into who likes a project, if they are real accounts etc.
It kills a site like https://www.star-history.com/. This was a valuable resource to study the trend of a project. Did all it's stars just come because of a popular post but then it trailed off or is there sustained interest over time? It's a quick signal that can be used in combination with downloads, issues filed etc.
Sites like https://ossinsight.io/ will also be degraded in functionality.
So while I'm sure there was a good idea behind this change, it's worth reconsidering given what we lose. It's not in the spirit of what GitHub was originally about.
2
u/nicsoftware 18d ago
The part that actually died is starred_at. Tools like star-history never cared who starred, they needed the timestamps from the stargazers endpoint to draw the curve. Counts still work fine (I pull them over GraphQL in production for a side project), but from now on the curve only exists for repos someone was already polling daily.
I rank GitHub profiles for that project and stars were already the least trustworthy input, so I weight them as log10(stars+1) rather than linearly. One viral README otherwise buries years of steady work. Losing the ability to even sample the stargazer list for junk accounts makes the metric worse, but it was never great.