> When I go to Github, the things I notice about a project are the number of stars and forks. These are easily gameable metrics that are supposed to indicate community engagement. The second thing I notice[...]
This is a habit that you have to train yourself into picking up. For that reason, I find it odd that the author acknowledges that these are poor proxies for the things the author is really interested in.
Maybe it's because I don't play video games, but it's easy for me to forget that GitHub even displays the number of stars and forks on a repo--it's part of the UI cruft that I ignore. In fact, it's jarring when people mention them in comments, or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. It's like we're living in different worlds, each with a completely different set of values.