I don’t know how any of these measurements of package «popularity» would work. I fear that anything we could come up with would become a skewed popularity contest.
Had we had a system that let people vote for their favourite package back when Chris started Phoenix it would have been shadowed by the popularity of Dynamo, which was build by Jose himself, and would gain tons of up-votes because of that. (Not saying this is how it would have panned out—this example is based on a big «what-if», and is pure fiction)
Besides that, stars on Github is not a good measure of what is good about the project. Say we have a project with a very funny Readme; tons of people would hit that star because of the lols. It might not solve the problem it claims to do, but it has a really funny Readme…
…and what if some popular twitter account post a link to a project on Github? Hoard of people would come to the page, each with a different idea about what it means to star something; some of them might use stars for «Interesting, should look into later», others might think «I have vetted this project and I use it in production.»
Not to mention all the projects that are not hosted on GitHub.
The best thing I’ve seen is something some of my friends whipped together for NPM called http://node-modules.com/ If you personalise your account the «popularity contest» is based on what your friends/followed on Github likes—not the entire world. This is not perfect, as it require the project to be on Github, but one great benefit about this is that you can ask your friends about their experience with a given package.
Hex should not deal with popularity contests in my opinion—only serve packages. A thing like node-modules for hex would be great but it should be a stand-alone service.
