Are developers losing interest on my project? An initial study on unstar events on GitHub platform

GitHub is the most popular social coding platform and the world's largest collection of open source software. In this platform, users can star repositories to manifest their interest or satisfaction with the hosted project. However, it is not possible to maintainers of these projects to know whether they are losing the interest of developers from this platform (i.e., developers are removing their stars). In this paper, we present an initial investigation on how often developers remove stars from GitHub projects and the impact on their popularity. Our results show that GitHub projects frequently lose stars, however these events do not have a major influence on their overall popularity since most of them gain more stars than lose stars. We also show that some programming languages retain the interest from developers for more time.