[justin_oaks]

I find such lists nigh unto useless. I don't have time to evaluate each project to see which one is the right fit for my needs.

We'd be better off if people did a deep dive analysis of just one of those categories.

I suspect that whoever constructs these types of lists does NOT have experience with each project, and thus there's bound to be plenty of projects that don't deserve to be on the list because they're just not ready for production usage.

[IndySun]

Correct. Also, I've viewed many so-called 'awesome' lists that have out of date, abandoned, discredited, links. Copy Pasted?

By all means take a look, but use some perspicacity.

[ozim]

I think people find it neat to have 'awesome list' and then they find out how much work it is to update it at least once a year.

Second idea, they put it on GH and expect that "community" will post pull requests to their list doing work. Maybe not in an 'evil' way but they think that idea is neat and others will find it also cool.

I found it in a way where I was setting website for a local hobby club. I have started initial web page, posted couple articles and wanted others to pick up and participate. After 3 months of initial "oh that is so cool we have a website", no one ever cared beside me, I operated website for 2 more years and moved on with life to other hobbies because of life.

[diggan]

Most of the time I think this is just a "contribution barrier" that has to be made as easy as possible.

With your local website example, did the people know how to contribute to it? Would they be able to do the full flow of writing -> gathering feedback -> publishing the article without you? Did they know what articles you wanted written? Same goes for the random "awesome lists" people are building. If it's not clear what's missing and what should be added, people really don't know where to get started, so the contributions will be very small.

I'm currently working on a project where we want to get designers to contribute to open source design. I expected it to be very hard to find any designer who would understand and wanted to contribute, as that's what I found before on other open source projects I've done.

But this time I focused on making it really easy for them to contribute, and lo and behold, just one week after soft-launching, we already have 2-3 designers onboard who contribute their time to help out with our open source design.

[corty]

Most "awesome lists" are just there for farming GitHub stars. There are people who think those will get them ahead in applications or salary negotiations.

This also means that after the initial inrush, long-term care is inefficient (star-wise) and the purpose is maybe already fulfilled anyways.

[zorbash]

The worst thing about "awesome" lists is that they're not searchable and as you say, they tend to have out of date links.

[ozim]

This looks more like stack for that company.

If that would be at least a list of tools they find amazing or solving some problem in a great way.

But it is just everything, trello, dnsmasq, openvas and a kitchen sink.