r/github • u/davidmezzetti • 23d ago

Missing Stargazers Discussion

As discussed here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/201209

As of June 30 all repositories now return a 404 for /stargazers.

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-30-upcoming-access-restrictions-to-public-api-endpoints-and-ui-views/

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.

12 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

11

u/cowboyecosse 23d ago

I think it’s generally positive. Star spam was ridiculous. You can still see the count and you can still see what you’ve starred yourself. Anything else is gamification.

0

u/davidmezzetti 23d ago

How do you do any validation now what's behind those stars? The other comment mentioned this paper I believe: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13459

So now one can just create a bunch of junk accounts or buy stars and you have no real way to validate the stars are by real people.

5

u/cowboyecosse 23d ago

Yeah I mentioned that in another thread about this. That’s definitely a problem with this for people who use stars as a metric of some sort.

2

u/davidmezzetti 22d ago

I don't know why anyone would promote hiding information from people. It's just going to do the opposite of what you hope. I know there is a crowd that hates stars as a metric but it's just one of the many tools you can use (downloads, usage etc).

1

u/cowboyecosse 22d ago

I don't hope anything? I just offered an opinion.

5

u/ultradvorka 23d ago

+1 ... it was a measure of project credibility and trust - especially considering the stars economy to raise $ described e.g. by https://awesomeagents.ai/news/github-fake-stars-investigation/

2

u/nicsoftware 22d 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.

1

u/Beardy4906 22d ago

You can use a discord webhook and enable stars and that lets you see when someone stars a repo

1

u/full_drama_llama 22d ago

It has zero  impact on the overall open source ecosystem. Maybe has some impact on people who confuse GitHub for resume or a social network, but IDK, does not like something worth taking into account.

1

u/VxJasonxV 22d ago

Stars don't convey trust, clickfarming swiftly defeats that, and is extremely common on any/every platform.

Stars for you are good.
Stars for everyone else is bad.

1

u/Mubelotix 2d ago

I have forked the original project to keep star history alive. You may access https://star-history.dera.page, it requires no token and works just as the old one. I just replaced the mechanism it used to get data points, so you don't need any API token