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.

Implicitly credible sources attract those who benefit from exploiting credibility. This weakens credibility until audiences move on.

Were they ever awesome? By design, they attract projects looking for visibility etc.

Most of those so-called awesome lists have zero to very little no human judgement when new projects are included. One example I found in the wild is [0], which has ca. 50 awesome projects already while libghostty isn't even stable. I doubt that even 10% of those projects are anywhere good, let alone _awesome_.

I, for one, would like to have an opposite — awful-<something>. Just so we know which things we should avoid. With AI, it's getting even more important to know what to use.

[0]: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty

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.

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

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).

Could have said “awesome repositories considered harmful”

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

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

> They usually contain curated knowledge and resources related to a certain domain

No, almost never curated.