Awesome repositories are no longer awesome

kdeldycke

I maintain 4 awesome lists and I agree: it takes a lot of time and some are more catalogs than curated lists. Curation takes time and is like gardening especially given the half-life of content on the web. My solution was to encode my editorial process in the form of contribution guidelines: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-iam/blob/main/.github/c...

Chaosvex

Never understood those repositories. Always viewed them as a collection of junk.

kalev

I used to reach for an awesome list the first thing as i ventured in something new. Nowadays, i almost kinda forgot about them. Still I hold a fond memory of it, they usually contained some real gems (especially when they were relatively new).

stridTastic

Disagree. Some material is just timeless or even just having a name is good to go on compared to knowing nothing before. AI is nice but never gives the same answer, will tunnel you if you have zero idea on the topic, and can be outright wrong or refuse to answer.

anushka_gandhi

The real tragedy here is the asymmetric warfare AI enables.It costs zero effort for a spammer to script 100 PRs linking to their AI-generated wrappers,but it takes genuine human energy for maintaners to vet and reject It's a fast-track to maintainer burnout.

bemtevi

I found a few lists that I found genuinely useful, like self-hosted. But I also think the problem with them is they were gamed for some reason, maybe because of Github stars and the fact that Github attention is useful for other things. I think it would have been much more useful to have them almost on a different platform. IMBD lists for example seem to work better because there's not much reward in making them except a love of movies. Also I think another problem is that they were given high recognition on Github, and thus became a formulaic pattern rather that some individual who is really passionate about trying the stuff on the list, which also made most of the later ones generic and much less interesting...

solyin

The problem is digital things don't decay in the same way as physical objects. AI can shit out a webpage for an institute that doesn't really exist and make it sound awesome until you realize there's nothing there. A webpage with a vibrant community behind it that is actively maintained looks, at first glance, the same as a page that's been put out to the pasture. A physical store that's out of business will accumulate cruft, broken windows, vines everywhere. There's not really an equivalent for bitrot. Sure, my website from 1996 looks dated because I used frames and we don't do that no more, but eBay and Yahoo and Myspace are still around. Link rot does set in though. Links to pages that no longer exist because the person running it has passed. Archive.org has such a good purpose. Thing is though, for software, sometimes things can just be done. If a perfectly good piece of software hasn't been updated in years because it hasn't needed to be updated , then let it sit, ensconced in stone. The problem is it's hard to tell the difference between that, and something that needs maintaining but hasn't been.

whoishiding

content curation > content generation

goodpoint

They never where.

pmxi

Simple: create an awesome list of awesome lists.

orphereus

Downfall of modern society if things don't change course.

Springtime

Every 'awesome' repo I can remember has seemingly been made by someone who hasn't used the things included and only read a project's readme. This dates back years before the LLM craze. I would rather hear from users of software and their opinions, otherwise I can't take seriously something ostensibly curated for quality. In my experience such lists serve better as a way to discover new projects using eg. some framework you're interested in, if they're maintained (which is still valuable).

meindnoch

They were always junk, full of formulaic, self-promoting, astroturfing trash. In most cases, it would be more appropriate to view them as content marketing (c.f. digital pollution), not actual developer resources.

Eighth

awesome-selfhosted was a favourite, but has become outdated. Other awesome repos have become a target for self promotion and junk.

kotnik

I still find a lot of interesting resources and ideas on Awesome List trackers like this: https://www.trackawesomelist.com .

zaik

For R there are CRAN Views, which are well maintained: https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/

zodwick

I'd like to add a third reason: SEO hacking

gosen

It's kind of inevitable that they stale because of the growth. Let's say it is about programming language - if it's good language then there're more good materials about it, that means more content to maintain in an "awesome repo", and then again and again, with or without AI it would go fully stale or unmaintainable. I guess there's no solution, these things should go to history and we need to find a better way to find "best of the best" individually while avoiding SEO-hacked resources with some bs. I actually think there's future in individual learning, so everybody will have their own learning plan, their own learning materials and all that adapted to the way they think and consume information.

shevy-java

In the long run we need to find viable alternatives to github. I don't mean gitlab either. I think we kind of need repositories for everyone, as a human right - sounds strange but IMO we kind of need to build a new web with a lasting impact on the world. We should not need web-archive; things should be documentable. (Github is not responsible for disappearing web-pages as such, mind you; I just mean that we need to look at the whole problem here, not just on github only as gatekeeper.) I don't like Google, but google-docs is great. LibreOffice should have something like that too. Every state as well. I really think this all needs to become a human right. Why is a US company offering this and just about everyone else is not, including governments? I don't understand it. And that is also just one example of many more things. We need to change the web to a better variant. In many ways the 1990s was better than what we have today. Everyone built websites. Today this is a bit ... well. Gone. People may at best put their "website" on facebook. That's a walled garden. It's not the same as having separate websites. I don't want the world wide web to become a walled garden gatekept by a few companies. But I don't see alternatives emerging - and nobody has time anymore, which is another problem.

matsemann

> They usually contain curated knowledge and resources related to a certain domain No, almost never curated.