This is my main problem with "awesome lists". I appreciate all the work that goes into cataloging things but without any exploration functionality (i.e. search, filter, sort), it's nearly useless. Tbh I don't recall a single time I really got something from an awesome list and I definitely haven't ever referred back to any of the lists I've saved/starred
They might be fun for random exploration if you're killing time, but not really a tool
I don’t believe “awesome lists” are intended to make your decisions for you; rather, they’re intended as an input for a business analyst to gather that data (i.e. to thoroughly follow all the links, read entries for competitors in a solution-space, and build a feature-matrix themselves) and then make those decisions. In that use-case, they’ve been invaluable to me personally.
Of course, you could get that same discoverability from language-package manager tool/website, if such systems ever allowed users (not developers!) to tag or otherwise multiply categorize packages, the way that e.g. Spotify allows users to create discoverable public playlists.
They're far from useless, awesome-whatever is usually great for getting an overview of what kind of tools exist out there and what some popular choices are.
If you're already aware of all that, sure, they don't add much information. Concise comparison is pretty difficult...except in cases like this.
I don't know if I agree. I think maybe thorough comparison is difficult. But if you have a list of, for example, open-source alternatives to Postman, just including something like the amount of GitHub stars a project has can go a really long way. Especially if it becomes a list of 20+ projects and many of them have less than 10 stars or are no longer being developed
The difference is basically the difference between a list and a table.
Huge bonus if you use something like a spreadsheet software to make it interactive/sortable
They might be fun for random exploration if you're killing time, but not really a tool