Dmoz – The Open Directory Project

http://www.dmoz.org/?x

by peter_l_downs • 11 years ago

30 22 11 years ago

dmoz.org

cloud362• 11 years ago

And the purpose of this is...

baby• 11 years ago

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:

* http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Math/Applications/Communication_...

I have no idea how they made it. It seems pretty random.

gpvos2• 11 years ago

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.

chaostheory3• 11 years ago

It's not really a a precursor to Wikipedia. It's just a more open Yahoo; the old version of Yahoo before it became a media site.

cloud362• 11 years ago

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.

peter_l_downs• 11 years ago

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!

bradhe• 11 years ago

I haven't heard anyone talk about dmoz in a long, long time...

bdcravens• 11 years ago

This has been around since 1998.

hondo77• 11 years ago

Who called the nineties?

randomstring• 11 years ago

Dmoz nearly died in 2006...

http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/dmoz_had_9_lives_used_up_yet....

kentf• 11 years ago

lol really. All the people who have been doing SEO since 2000 are shaking their heads right now.

zuccs• 11 years ago

Google still pulls its descriptions from there if it doesn't like your ones!

sosuke• 11 years ago

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.

rasengan• 11 years ago

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.

kbar13• 11 years ago

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?

jimjimjim• 11 years ago

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.

programmernews3• 11 years ago

Trust to masses doesn't contradict with identifying corrupt contributers. Take Wikipedia for an example.

erobbins• 11 years ago

isn't this the original yahoo with new paint?

chaostheory3• 11 years ago

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.

Dmoz – The Open Directory Project

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