Comment by ZeroConcerns

Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google"

And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.

Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.

And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.

TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.