Awesome-github are indeed curated open-source lists. If you know better resources feel free to open a pull request so that I can incorporate those, thanks!
I don’t have any problem with the content of your list. I just don’t like the boasty self-promotional feel of titling a thing “awesome”. It feels like it would feel if I made my LW username “gjm, who is very intelligent”, or if I went to buy a dictionary and found that they all had names like “The Best English Dictionary”. To me, “awesome” is a label for other people to attach to you or your work, if they’re impressed, not something you put on your own work to promote it. Not least because “the person who made this thinks it’s good” conveys much less information than “some other people think this is good”.
I can see that my comment got a downvote, so clearly at least one person doesn’t feel that way :-). Maybe it’s a cultural thing? I’m in the UK, where there’s a general tradition of self-deprecation and irony and the like; I have the impression that things are a bit different in e.g. the US.
An “awesome list” is a known thing, particularly in programmer (San Francisco Bay Area?) culture, that contains a list of “awesome” things in a particular topic. For example, this list of “awesome” software projects in the Java programming language.
I don’t think the name is really meant to be self-congratulatory. Presumably whoever made the first one did intend it to be self-congratulatory, but at this point it’s just people copying an existing pattern.
To someone in the know, it’s a helpful short hand, but it’s unfortunately very confusing for someone like you who isn’t.
I did find the awesome-list github repo, but didn’t have the cultural context of “awesome list” just meaning “list of things I am impressed by”. If I had looked more carefully at the github repo I would have seen that it says “a list of awesome things” and should at that point have figured out what’s going on.
It seems a pity to confuse “list that is awesome” with “list of things that are awesome”, but I guess what’s done is done.
Awesome-github are indeed curated open-source lists. If you know better resources feel free to open a pull request so that I can incorporate those, thanks!
I don’t have any problem with the content of your list. I just don’t like the boasty self-promotional feel of titling a thing “awesome”. It feels like it would feel if I made my LW username “gjm, who is very intelligent”, or if I went to buy a dictionary and found that they all had names like “The Best English Dictionary”. To me, “awesome” is a label for other people to attach to you or your work, if they’re impressed, not something you put on your own work to promote it. Not least because “the person who made this thinks it’s good” conveys much less information than “some other people think this is good”.
I can see that my comment got a downvote, so clearly at least one person doesn’t feel that way :-). Maybe it’s a cultural thing? I’m in the UK, where there’s a general tradition of self-deprecation and irony and the like; I have the impression that things are a bit different in e.g. the US.
An “awesome list” is a known thing, particularly in programmer (San Francisco Bay Area?) culture, that contains a list of “awesome” things in a particular topic. For example, this list of “awesome” software projects in the Java programming language.
I don’t think the name is really meant to be self-congratulatory. Presumably whoever made the first one did intend it to be self-congratulatory, but at this point it’s just people copying an existing pattern.
To someone in the know, it’s a helpful short hand, but it’s unfortunately very confusing for someone like you who isn’t.
I did find the awesome-list github repo, but didn’t have the cultural context of “awesome list” just meaning “list of things I am impressed by”. If I had looked more carefully at the github repo I would have seen that it says “a list of awesome things” and should at that point have figured out what’s going on.
It seems a pity to confuse “list that is awesome” with “list of things that are awesome”, but I guess what’s done is done.
Nothing much to add to gbear605, there was no self-congratulatory intent here! I’m editing the title to make this a bit more clear.