All these "awesome list of ..." maybe means that there is a need for a site like Yahoo in the 90's which tried to catalogize internet in a hierarchical list-of-lists manner.
Well, the list of tools is at least as useful as the most useful tool on the list, and probably reflects the overall usefulness of its category. Which means that if we go enough levels farther, the master list of lists [of lists...] would reflect the overall usefulness of all software on GitHub.
Also maybe GitHub needs a "list of stuff" category, so these lists of things don't muddle search results and conversely can be searched for easily. Curated lists of links are generally quite useful and putting it all in a public vcs with a pull request infrastructure makes it easy to contribute.
I definitely see a usefullness in these lists, I just feel sad that they get a lot more attention than actual code repositiories.
Indeed, Github should find a solution for this. I didn't care much about Github stars but recently I noticed they're being required in various scenarios, for example some CDN require a certain number of Github stars to include a library [1]
I don't think Github stars should be considered as anything more than built-in bookmarking. Personally, I only use them that way. With this view, it's obvious why lists get more stars than the projects listed.
Well, Github could select an official list per technology, move it to eg. the github.com/explore part and reward the curator with money or software licenses/subscriptions.
What if I'd like something that the arbitrary community manager of GitHub doesn't? Why would a software project management site be the arbiter of good software?
dmoz was that site for a long time after yahoo became it's 2000s incarnation, but then dmoz went away, there are a couple of live archives of it, but still...
But these lists also already fulfill the need. When there's a category of something people are interested in someone will eventually make an "awesome list of ...". The good lists become popular and become included in various "awesome list of lists" improving their discoverability, while the bad lists fade into obscurity. And since there is no central authority and plenty of alternatives each list can be opinionated instead of including everything under the sun.
These lists follow the same "survival of the fittest" that underlies capitalism and evolution, and while coordinated efforts have many advantages they also have all the disadvantages of monoliths. I think a Yahoo-like site would have a hard time producing a better result.
Free markets mostly work because people vote with their dollars. Democracies mostly work because people vote with their votes. Web democracies fail because votes are trivial to manipulate and gamed by SEO.
But web dictatorships work great because switching costs are low, so if a dictator doesn't deliver people just go somewhere else. While centralized link lists are often democratic, awesome lists form a network of dictatorships.