It really depends on your definition of &quot;list.&quot; I would actually argue that the entire Internet is made up of lists, but there are a few things that change the way we see them:<p>* Cadence (how often the lists changes)<p>* Content type (what got on the list and how did it get there)<p>* Sort (how the content is sorted)<p>If we wander back into the earlier Internet, Yahoo was arguably the dominant player. And what was Yahoo? A list of links divided up by category.<p>Google came along and won the game because it&#x27;s better in the world than anyone else at sorting lists of webpages. It&#x27;s so good that it can actually sort them without having anyone ever see them or read them, and that allows them to scale to a level Yahoo couldn&#x27;t even dream of, with better results all the while. Google is the best, technology-enabled list-making service in the world.<p>Now the way most people use Facebook is to see a list of all the stuff their friends have posted about. Originally it was ordered solely by time, but now they have a little more data about what you like to click on and what&#x2F;who you&#x27;re interested in, and help you out a bit.<p>Twitter is a list of what certain people and organizations you follow are publishing right now.<p>HackerNews and Reddit and ProductHunt are lists of the best X as decided by the community, with a gravity (or 24-hour session) added so the older stuff falls down over time, keeping them fresh.<p>Pinterest, although not a list in the sense that it&#x27;s a vertical ascending&#x2F;descending list (unless you&#x27;re on a mobile device), is in actuality a list of all the products and photos your friends are gathering into their various collections.<p>The purpose of Yelp and Foursquare is largely to give me a list of places I should go to based on the information provided by my friends or the crowd.<p>In other words, the reason you&#x27;re not seeing lists is because you&#x27;re thinking of &quot;lists&quot; as a two-dimensional object; something in which someone comes in and compiles a list of X and others consume it. In reality this is happening in several ways, there&#x27;s just often a lot more nuance and color than someone coming through to create their own collection.<p>At the end of the day, a list is just a data sort. The Internet is <i>made</i> of lists. The interesting thing, at least in my opinion, is how you accumulate that data and how you sort it. If you define &quot;list-making&quot; as the accumulation and sorting of data, almost every big tech company I can think of is in the list-making business.