Awesome repositories are no longer awesome

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 help maintaining one of these awesome lists, awesome-javascript, since 2018. There's been always self-promoting or similar activities, or someone coming up with an idea/forking a repository and doing some small changes, then thinking they're suggesting something groundbreaking. Because of this, we needed to add a few checks over the years to the pull request template, that basically asks if the resource is out there for a while, actively maintained, actively used by people, etc.

Recently, thanks to AI being this cheap and accessible, the amount of shitty PRs quadrupled if not more. And the worst part? Agent doesn't care about the checklist at all and re-writing the PR body with bunch of nonsense that we maintainers need to read, understand, and evaluate. I started keeping the score for the most shittiest PR based on how soon after the first commit made they open the PR. It was 11h, then 10h, and now it is 6h. How on earth a 6h old repository with zero user is considered "awesome" I don't know, but people should stop prompting their agents to create 10s of these PRs every day.

Yes, there's always an alternative: stop maintaining these lists. I don't think it's a viable option either. Sometimes you start using a new piece of tech and want to have access to somewhat curated list of resources that might speed up your understanding. There's still a bit of value to keep them alive and it's dying out bit by bit (literally) every time someone mass-creates these spammy PRs.

Thanks for reading my unsolicited rant.

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've personally never found awesome lists great at curation, at best they were always a laundry list of what was out there. But I think they were an excellent jumping point for discovery. I was recently working on a new project with C#, and never having used C# or the .NET ecosystem the lists were a great way to find a lot of options (even if I didn't end up using them).

Some of them probably don't really need to exist, I think I saw one that was fantasy book recommendations which looked like it was just a copy of the top 100 fantasy books from goodreads.

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 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 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'd like to better understand the reason behind these pull requests. Its not like Claude is goofing off on the Internet and trolling humans. People are prompting AI to create pull requests against a bunch of 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?

I am old enough to know Yahoo Directory, and "awesome" projects are exactly that.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Could have said “awesome repositories considered harmful”

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).

I have never heard of the concept before. I clicked at the "awesome-R" link and... what am I supposed to do with that? It's a huge list of random shit and there's no way for me to filter out things that might be relevant to the problem I am currently trying to solve.

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.

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

content curation > content generation

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

Simple: create an awesome list of awesome lists.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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