Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Why do we have GitHub curated lists? (github.com/jnv)
3 points by renegat0x0 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



Why do we have curated lists in github?

Example: https://github.com/jnv/lists

- Do we not have that knowledge on the Internet?

- Is it because google search is dying? Is it because github search is better than google search?

- Is being on github provides ability for social interactions, while individual sites do not? Stars, comments, etc?

- Is github more stable? Individual sites stop working randomly, while github lists pointing to other github lists will most likely stay relevant longer?

- Doesn't that work like "Facebook for devs"?

The whole idea that we build our knowledge as github lists looks like a community curated book, or search engine, or bookmark manager looks weird to me. The Internet is so full with automation, scripts, program, that surprises me that so much manual labor is required to run this operation.


The reasons I see are:

1. People trust stuff on GitHub. It makes you think "a group who knows what they're doing did this" instead of "hey look another random blog written by 1 person who's probably just as new to this as I am"

2. Collaboration is great on GitHub. Anyone can submit a patch or whatever to add stuff to the lists, or update/remove stuff as time goes on. A blog post found on Google is probably years out of date.


Collaboration is important. If you publish something that's wrong, you are an issue or pull request away from fixing it. Contributors count and last modified date are easy to find and trustworthy. Stars act like up votes, adding even more credibility.


Sadly, and often wrongly, many people seem to consider GitHub easier to manage or more dependable than a list on their own web site.

Regarding the lists themselves, it's a straightforward strategy against enshittification.

Web search tends to bury valuable content under heaps of worthless content, nowadays mostly "AI" generated content, so dealing with a person (even if their list is somewhat low quality or not aligned with your needs) gives a lot of signal to noise improvement over the aggregate output of the SEO/advertisement industrial complex.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: