Seeking feedback: How useful is Daily Stars Explorer for you?

[emanuelef]

Hi everyone,

I started this project out of curiosity, I wanted to visualise how many stars a GitHub repository receives each day and how that trend evolves over time. From there, the project grew through a series of experimental ideas I wanted to try out, rather than following a defined roadmap or specific user feedback. The result is a somewhat messy, engineering-style UI that reflects this exploratory and unstructured approach.

To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure how useful this tool is to others. At some point, I even started seeing the stars not as a measure of popularity, but as just a metric to observe and analyse, detached from any particular meaning.
I’m fully aware that stars aren't a reliable indicator of a project's actual usefulness, I’ve come across incredibly valuable tools with very few stars, and others that gather massive star counts more for visibility or curation than practical utility.

That brings me to you:

• Do you use Daily Stars Explorer ? What features do you find most valuable ?
• Do you use the feeds or transform features ?
• Apart from star trends, do you also find the other timeline metrics useful, like forks, pull requests, issues, or contributors?
• Are there any improvements or ideas you’d like to see implemented ?

This project is something I maintain in the background, and I’d love to get a better sense of how it's being used, or how it could be more useful. Any feedback is appreciated, even short or critical ones.

Thanks!

[wenxi-onyx]

Extremely useful. Using stars as a visibility/growth/marketing metric. Primarily use it for daily counts of our repo. Do not use feeds/transform features. Do not use the other timelines, but if they were KPIs, I probably would. Happy to think about feature improvements, but really the existing app is exactly what I was looking for.

[mbailey]

I just noticed the link at the top of daily stars linking to this discussion. Great idea!

I don't know anyone who uses VoiceMode but when I release a new version it gets > 1000 downloads on the first day (and ~3000) in the first week if not followed by another release in that time. I'm really curious how people are using VoiceMode but efforts to add privacy respecting telemetry keep getting put in the backlog because it's something I would want to really get right to ensure nobody is adversely affected.

Given only one person has posted, perhaps I shouldn't get my hopes up that github discussions will be the answer for me extracting info from users.

So, I use Daily Stars daily. You've crafted a really tight tool. Thankyou!

I use the following features:

• weekly binning
• last 30 days

Thanks for making this available.

Mike

[PranayBatta]

Can’t go without this to track our growth. I always keep a tab open, and the CSV export has helped me do deeper analysis on my own. As a marketer, this is gold. I don’t think any other history tracker comes close.

That said, I feel the feed feature could be improved a lot. I’ve personally mentioned my repo on Reddit and those posts didn’t get captured, even though one got around 200 upvotes. Happy to share more details if that helps debug it.

It would also be great to have a week-on-week growth rate chart. That would make it easier to see whether the daily growth per week is actually increasing over time.

Thanks for building this. Really appreciate it.

[emanuelef]

Thanks so much for the kind words and for taking the time to share this feedback, really appreciate it!

On the feed/mentions feature: you're absolutely right, there's a lot of room for improvement. The current approach for Reddit (and other platforms) relies on keyword matching against repo names, which means repos with common or generic names generate a lot of false positives, and conversely, posts that reference a repo differently (e.g. by product name rather than the GitHub repo slug) get missed entirely. I'd love to explore using some AI-based analysis to better match posts to repos, something that can understand context and filter out false positives from common words. If you're willing to share the Reddit post details, that would definitely help debug and improve the matching logic.

On the week-on-week growth rate: just added it! You can now find it under Transform → WoW Growth Rate on any repo's star timeline. It shows the percentage change in weekly star totals between consecutive weeks, with a 0% reference line so you can quickly see whether your growth is accelerating. Previously the closest thing was Transform → Weekly Binning, which shows raw weekly totals, the new option complements that by showing the rate of change between weeks.

Thanks again, feedback like this is what drives the project forward!

[martin-mfg]

I use Daily Stars Explorer to track the stars/popularity of my new project, as well as the stars of similar existing projects. In comparison to other star trackers I appreciate the more detailed data.
I rarely use the transforms, mostly to see average or weekly star growth. I just now discovered the feeds. The other timelines weren't so interesting yet. Partially because my project is rather new, so there's not much of a timeline.
One improvement idea would be to allow users to select a time-frame to zoom into via clicking and dragging in an existing chart, like it works e.g. in Grafana.

Thanks for building this great tool!

[emanuelef]

Thanks a lot for the feedback and for using the tool, really glad to hear you find the detailed data useful!

Good suggestion about zooming. You can already zoom into a specific time frame in two ways: by moving the two handles in the preview chart at the bottom of the graph, or by scrolling up and down while your mouse is over the main chart. That lets you quickly focus on a shorter period of activity.

Thanks again for the kind words and the suggestion!