Who are you people that fork repos without starring them? 😢

If you fork a repository because you are unhappy with what the original developer is doing, doesn't that make sense?

@Jilano If it's that bad then make your own repo and do it better? If it had enough good stuff in it for you to consider it a good base to build on, you should star it.

@NickyBones I understand your point. I guess it all depends on how much value one associates with the "star".

@Jilano The star is crucial! If I can't be an Instagram princess, at least let me have this :D

++ for the tags.

@irene Because my sense of self-worth is based on other people's encouragements, of course.
Or were you expecting a serious answer to explain a humorous rant?

@irene Not in general. But an active Github account that has many forks and stars, gives you credit in some places, when looking for a job. There are other places who care about your StackOverflow status...it's a way to distinguish yourself from others when you have 300 people applying for a position. So why not?

@Jilano Took the words outta my mouth.

@NickyBones That doesn't make any sense. A code base can still be horrible, but usable. Like, maybe the developer took the most roundabout solutions out there, instead of optimizing (as an example). Why would you upstar something that is put together lazily?

@Fexell "Oh I'm sorry! Do you want them back?" :D

@M1sf3t That makes more sense, then again, some people might just want to do it themselves.

@Fexell If it's a code addressing a super common issue, then you will probably not a fork a shitty repo, because there are many options to pick from and you can find the one that is optimized/well-structured/written in your favorite style.
When it is the absolutely only repo handling this issue, it probably tackles complicated problems, where coding is not the focus (but the algorithm for example). So even if the code is not up to your standards, it still deserves recognition.

@NickyBones I take it you've never seen Chrome's repo.

@Fexell No. And I assume you never had to solve/discretize differential geometry or variational calculus. So you probably can't appreciate how relieving it is when someone else already translated the article or equations into code, no matter how bad this code is.

@NickyBones Doesn't change the fact that it's bad (or ugly) code.

@Fexell Yes, but as I mentioned not all repos are strictly about code. Code is a means to an end, not the goal itself.

@NickyBones Uhm, that doesn't sound right. You can almost always update code to be better.

@Fexell If you are a programmer. If you are physicist or a mathematician, who supplies a piece of working software even if it's not optimized, then for me it's good enough. There are people whose profession is coding - and it's ok to set up high standards for them. But there are a lot of non-programmers who use Github, giving us implementation engineers a very good place to start from.

I'm convinced that most people who fork repos don't actually mean to do so...