It's crazy to me how quickly this conversation has devolved. If Pewdiepie had all his Youtube subscribers deleted should he just say "oh well, the ones that like me will come back". No. Because that's an absurd attitude. Obviously that would forever hurt his viewership. Github is no different with stars. They matter. Period. Maybe not to you. But they matter.
Pewdiepie's compensation is intrinsically related to his subscriber count, no? That gives him a reason to care. Is your compensation similarly related to your github star count? I sure hope not..
If I unstar your repo, I have not taken anything from you because you never owned my star in the first place. Github presents this number to you as though it were important, to give you a dopamine hit when the number goes up. Their motivation for doing this is obvious. If you fall for this trick, that's on you. You have the choice to stop caring.
And even if the premise of these metrics being important were accepted, the fact remains that the removal of people from the watchers list is not irreversible. No irreplaceable documents were destroyed. No diaries were burned. If the repository had been deleted, commit history erased, that would be comparable to a diary burning. But that's not what happened (and would probably still be reversible.)
For which to happen you've to do the same thing: type out its name. So I wonder if people ask for privatize to be presented with number of stars, should when deleting a repo GitHub present you with number of commits, issues, releases, etc as well?
