As opposed to judging the stupidity of blog posts by how facile their analyses are?<p>&quot;I think this metric is much more accurate than you might first assume&quot;, and yet when looking at one of the &quot;stupidest&quot; projects, Jekyll Now, step number one in the README is literally &quot;fork this project&quot;. And in this case, it makes <i>perfect</i> sense, since the goal is to get a yourusername.github.io blog up. That wouldn&#x27;t be possible if they <i>didn&#x27;t</i> fork.<p>At a much more basic level, this article conflates stupidity with a) making custom alterations that are never propagated back to the original project, b) misguided enthusiasm for working on a project and c) inexperience with git and GitHub instead of stupidity, per se.<p>I suspect a, b, and c account for a huge fraction of the forks. I, myself, have forked projects I respected and wanted to contribute to, but never got around to. But since there&#x27;s no penalty for unused forks, users have no incentive to clean up their project list.