The problem with DMOZ is the corruption of the moderators. This is also becoming apparent in some of the other large community moderated platforms. The final frontier, in essence, is a crowd based decentralized platform for all things social.
Is crowdsourcing really that great of an idea? content is usually better served curated, at least that's the thinking in the past, right? i.e. galleries, museums.
With crowdsourcing, I think you get to a point where content coming in becomes normalized (see reddit), and people start migrating away from that community in search of more variety. I would also like to point out the boston bombings fiasco as an example that internet crowdsourcing (read as angry enabled mob) can be silly if not dangerous.
Have there been any studies on how a flat community behaves on the internet?
I'm more inclined to trust dedicated moderators than the masses. Moderators may become corrupted but at least it can be eventually identified but if it's decided by the masses, who can be just as effectively manipulated, then it's much more difficult to point out the bias or correct.
I have no idea why people would upvote this story.
It is a book containing a bunch of links sorted by categories. Anyone can submit, it has to be approved by some people and then you are on it and maybe other search engines will use it. Although, I doubt anyone is using DMOZ nowadays. It is pretty old... I'm surprised it is still up.
If I had something interesting to say about that, I ran into their list of cryptographers:
Pretty much how you navigated the web before search engines. Also, something all SEO'ers tried to get their sites into as search engines used to use this as seed site for their crawling process. But, yeah, I don't know why anybody would post it. Maybe they were feeling nostalgic.
I submitted this because, although it might be hard to believe, I'm young enough that I hadn't heard of it, and only found it during a random link deep dive. It felt like some eldritch internet horror that the people on HN might know about and be able to explain!
This is one of the first open content projects. A precursor of Wikipedia in a way. I'm surprised it still exists. It was fairly popular, but mostly because there weren't any really better directories, and Google wasn't all-encompassing yet.
It's Wikipediaesque in that it's a collaboratively produced redference. No it doesn't have the content element of Wikipedia, but the idea that random netizens could take on Yahoo was novel.
It's still a bad argument. Just because it's collaborative, it doesn't make it Wikipediaesque since it's obviously just a directory and not a wiki. It's like calling a bicycle, automotive; just because it has wheels and can move. Moreover (I don't know if this has changed but) back then, you'd have to apply and be approved to actually edit content on dmoz vs just being able to register and being able to edit content on wikipedia.
I edited my comment from "A precursor of Wikipedia" to "A precursor of Wikipedia in a way" pretty quickly after I posted it, but maybe you reacted to the first version? I wanted to refer to the fact that it's open content (see first sentence) and collaborative, not that the content itself is similar.
You do have a point about the having to be approved to be able to edit. It wasn't very hard to get approval though.
What is old is new, I still want a good directory site like this. Spam is just crazy though. I wonder if you could set it up as a request to mail in links via filled out form. That would cut down on the junk.
The difference being that volunteers edited the data. The whole point of this site pretty much died once Google showed up a long time ago. I'm not sure what makes this site interesting today unless I'm missing something.
