Hacker News is auto-curated (at least partly). I'm not sure how much faith I would put in an editor, and projects like Ubuntu and Homebrew already act like gate

Hacker News is auto-curated (at least partly). I'm not sure how much faith I would put in an editor, and projects like Ubuntu and Homebrew already act like gatekeepers. It would be valuable to come up with a good way of recording the opinions of the crowd, though, and it would be more cost-effective, too. Searching for free software on Google Code or Github isn't bad, but they only index their own projects. There might be value in having an index maintained by a neutral third party.