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.

I'd like to better understand the reason behind these pull requests. Its not like Claude is goofing off on the Internet and trolling people. People are prompting AI to create pull requests against random repositories.

But why? Are people trying to advertise their tools in the "awesome" lists?

What about the many PRs against popular tools? Are they trying to build a resume through OSS contributions?

Even before AI they hardly provided any value.

Are you going to click them one by one and figure out what they do? When you need a library/existing tool, do you use Google or come to such a project and do a search?

It's no different from looking at Yahoo Directory for ideas vs run a Google search.

You can't really do much other than bookmarking/"starring" and then completely forgetting about it.

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.

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...

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).

There is a lot of value in good curation but its also extremely time consuming to curate well. Its very difficult to do it as a group activity especially a highly disconnected one via git/opensource and where a lot of these lists started out good the collective effort has ruined their value.

I think we need curation more than ever on the internet on a range of topics where social media of various forms don't work very well. I also think there is a real place for index's as well because search often does adjacency quite poorly since its not really optimised for that. Short curated lists are great for beginning, long ones not so much to anyone.

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...

I get the impression that we need social mechanisms to segment ourselves away from AI.

I'm broadly pro AI, I like datacentres etc, but its clear we cannot let our entire culture be penetrated by it.

At work we'll use AI aggressively, at home we'll socially punish anyone who blurs this line.

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