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.
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.
Completely disagree. When AI was new I found so many great tools through awesome-* repositories. There was some of that going on for sure, but most lists were a curation of good tools.
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...
I used to be the editor of a newspaper. Eventually, actually reviewing all the articles in the newspaper took too long time, so instead of shutting down the newspaper, I just started accepting every single article, eventually everyone stopped reading it.
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...
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.
They’re a kind of modern version of web directories, and they failed for the same reason the original web directories did (spam/self-promotion, and outdated stuff).
The "actual awesome" lists were awesome, as every single software linked in those were good software.
But yeah, once "influencer developers" got a hold of the concept, misunderstood it to be an index rather than a curated list, it stopped loosing any value the concept had.
Now it's just random individuals who want to "own" a collection, but have zero care about the quality, and just merge whatever additions.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
Same with newspaper, ALWAYS been full of JUNK, they never started out well, got exploited and now wildly different than they initially were.
Completely disagree. When AI was new I found so many great tools through awesome-* repositories. There was some of that going on for sure, but most lists were a curation of good tools.
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...
I used to be the editor of a newspaper. Eventually, actually reviewing all the articles in the newspaper took too long time, so instead of shutting down the newspaper, I just started accepting every single article, eventually everyone stopped reading it.
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...
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.
For R there are CRAN Views, which are well maintained: https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/
Never understood those repositories. Always viewed them as a collection of junk.
They’re a kind of modern version of web directories, and they failed for the same reason the original web directories did (spam/self-promotion, and outdated stuff).
The "actual awesome" lists were awesome, as every single software linked in those were good software.
But yeah, once "influencer developers" got a hold of the concept, misunderstood it to be an index rather than a curated list, it stopped loosing any value the concept had.
Now it's just random individuals who want to "own" a collection, but have zero care about the quality, and just merge whatever additions.
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).
I still find a lot of interesting resources and ideas on Awesome List trackers like this: https://www.trackawesomelist.com.
I'd like to add a third reason: SEO hacking
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).
Downfall of modern society if things don't change course.
content curation > content generation
awesome-selfhosted was a favourite, but has become outdated. Other awesome repos have become a target for self promotion and junk.
Simple: create an awesome list of awesome lists.
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.
> Some material is just timeless
Software tends to not fall into that category, though.
They never where.
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.