Well, I wish him and anyone who gets involved every success.
However, contrast esr
"Freshmeat/freecode required that every project creations and release be pre-moderated by humans. This was a serious bottleneck, and may have been the site’s undoing by imposing staffing costs on the operators. We need to avoid this."
with the highest level post by user liedra above who worked for the original project...
"We had stupidly high standards, and I don't think a lot of people really knew how much we threw out over the years, or how much we sanitised the entries (so much broken English!). We also had to (to a certain degree) sanity check the projects - make sure they looked like they did what they did."
Am I thinking that we are collectively saying we can't afford to add value through curation or editing?
Hmmm. I think ESR's talk of cost is a bad framing to use when thinking about businesses; I think in terms of value creation and sustainability.
If we imagine two sites, one with manual curating and editing and one without, the former's clearly more valuable. The question for me is whether the value created is enough that we can extract enough cash in return to make it sustainable. If you eliminate the editors, it could be that the lowered value makes the business less sustainable, not more so.
Either way, I think ESR's view is an interesting hypothesis, but it's one I'd definitely test. But I'd also test the hypothesis that the Freshmeat model just doesn't make sense any more, in that people who previously used it now solve their problems in other, better ways.
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.
I have a feeling that more than one replacement initiative will emerge, but the market will sort it out in the end. ESR has a strong preference for doing something in Python, and some people will probably coalesce around that. OTOH, I've started a project for a potential replacement codebase, based on Grails + Groovy.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5948