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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

At what point did the Awesome-lists purpose change from "Here's stuff I personally verified to be pretty awesome" to "Here's a list of stuff I came across when searching but I have no idea about the quality of stuff"?

Not that having some sort of collection/index is bad or anything, it's just way less useful than a curated list of things you actually find "awesome" and related to some topic.

For the ones who weren't around at the "creation" of awesome-lists, this I think is the origin: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/blob/main/awesome.md

> If you want your list to be included on awesome, try to only include actual awesome stuff in your list. After all, it's a curation, not a collection.

Today, the name remains, but not for curation.

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Part of that is that before it was more of personal curation list. Now it is basically collection of curated list of individuals contributing to an awesome list. To be honest it serve the role of having a place where you explore new things. The most famous one for me is awesome selfhosted, I visit it every couple of month to see the new development in this area because it is interesting to me.

“Selfhosed” describes a lot of my software development.

Sorry it is a typo as you can imagine :D

As another self-hoser, I'd call it a Freudian Slip :)

Links

1: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

2: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ (same source, just easier to read)

People started to game it, either to make the "biggest list" and thus end up being the "offical" one for some concept. Or if you have a big list, you will end up with hundreds of people wanting their library/tool/blog/whatever into the list to gain virality, and it's hard to argue with everyone so they're included. (Just look at issues/PRs on any of these repos, always loads of people posting their stuff)

So yeah, the lists are quite useless, no curation.

I'm sad the top comment is this.

We should be marveling over how much better of a world this is than the "GPT Store".

The open AI company, Deep Seek, is kicking OpenAI's ass. This is a million percent better.

I wasn't comparing it to anything, but commenting that it's sad it isn't curated. GPT Store isn't curated either, and I agree, probably contains much more stuff that isn't "awesome" at all.

I'm not even advocating for OpenAI, why bring that up?

The only comment as of this moment that isn't meta dumping on these lists is the following:

> this is cool, thank you deepseek.

While not incredibly substantive, it's at least directionally aligned.

My comment isn't so much about the subject of your post or its content, but rather that it's steered the entire conversation of this thread. Nobody is talking about Deep Seek, or more importantly, the ecosystem that can be built around it.

Shouldn't we expect more community curation of tools and utilities from an organic community like this? Clearly this effort is just getting started, so of course it's off to a rough start. So what?

I'm disappointed to click into this thread and find that the entire conversation is about how bad DeepSeek's list is and how awful these lists are in general. I would have expected people to be talking about different parts of the market, which pieces need to be built, how the tooling works together, etc.

Frankly who fucking cares about these lists anyway? The point is to build open, community-based AI. That's the only thing that matters in the fullness of time.

I'm not angry at you, and I don't think you did anything wrong. I just want to build these open efforts up to their fullest. I'm starting to devote more of my time to it because I want open approaches to win. Whether it's Deep Seek, some other family of models, or the community as a whole.

edit:

There's also the following comment:

> Does the api work again? It has been offline each time I tried it over the last month

So I guess at least we're talking about Deep Seek.

> Frankly who fucking cares about these lists anyway?

Obviously, at least 100 HN users care enough to upvote it, for one or another reason. I think it sounds a bit weird to ask who cares about it when it's literally on the front-page.

I guess all I can ask of you is "Be the change you want to see". Steering conversations by asking people to not post something is a fools errand, while if you try to start interesting top-level comments yourself, you'll at least have a chance of getting what you seem to want, instead of meta-conversations about why people don't talk about what you want them to talk about.

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