They always felt like the Webrings of the 21st century.

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.

Most of these were as slop as they are now.

The difference today is just that AI has supercharged the sloppening, making it obvious even to the most oblivious of observers, that the format has issues.

Which is a common theme in many things that have been "ruined by AI"

content curation > content generation

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

Could have said “awesome repositories considered harmful”

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

Simple: create an awesome list of awesome lists.

Like YT vids, anything titled with AWESOME, leaves me suspicious.