Garnet's first thoughts There have been various competitors to Dmoz: joeant is a free arm of looksmart One that let you become a zealot to contribute to the directory (zeal) I developed a competitor a few years ago: "Truly Open Directory"

Hard to compete with ODP:

• Ideas are a dime a dozen
• ODP tools were fast, efficient and intuitive
• ODP excludes a lot of people capable of building a directory
• DMOZ already did it, so why would someone else want to do something that has already been done?
• Usually a maximum of 3 commercial projects per niche: ODP, Yahoo, MSN
• People aren't regularly using ODP - The links result in very little traffic
• DMOZ has a large content base already built
  • 500 editors working full time, 2 programmers, 30 reviews a day - 5 million listings in a year.
  • Most sites aren't listable
• Search is quick enough to find things that directory traversal is often not needed, and very inefficient by comparison
• Most of DMOZ problems are because of the editors (which any competitor might have to also rely on)
  • Editors want to list their own sites. It's difficult to get an editor to pay attention to submissions. This entices webmasters to apply as editors for the sole reason of listing their site... which makes it necessary to more throughly screen editors... which leads to less editors...
• Few people continue to use directories like DMOZ (Garnet's note: When I tell my tech friends my war stories of why I feel it needs to be replaced, few of my tech friends seem to even know about it before I mentioned it. Even fewer of my non-tech internet user friends knew of it. Webmasters are the main people who know about DMOZ, and only the ones who are really interested in the topic of website promotion.)
• To attract high quality editors, you need a lot of content already online developed by high quality editors.
• Ad-free nature of dmoz encourages editors who wouldn't contribute to a money making machine for free
• Topic experts are needed to keep nonsense out of categories, hard to do with a group of a few experts
• Out of date concept
  • Yahoo with billions of funding isn't investing in directories
  • Even google de-emphasizes their directory build on dmoz
• Smaller niche directories may be more popular in combination than a single mega-directory
  • Smaller niche directories may have more content in their niches than dmoz
  • About.com - Then called "The Mining Company" tried to do this

Most of the 'problems' that most webmasters who submit to DMOZ complain about like slow turnaround, slow or no response, unedited cats, corruption among editors, apathy among editors, etc... they all center around the editors. They may center around the editors, but they really center around the expectation of a service from DMOZ. DMOZ does not provide any sort of service to webmasters. Perhaps those who want to complain should try and ask for a refund.

Zeal and Looksmart

• Someone remarked they are on their "last legs"

Is Dmoz outdated?

What would yellow pages and hoovers think about the statement "Directories are outdated"

Why doesn't DMOZ use automated selection solutions?

• Robozilla - automated link checker for directories
• Hutcheson denies that there is any need for editors to have duplicate url submission tools as suggested in the forum. And telling the submitters that "url is already submitted" is something ODP has no need to bother with.
  • Only spammers need the "site submittal status reports"
  • Hutcheson claims the only mechanism needed is the "editor" mechanism
• Commenter mentions being hired to work on a client website where the client was already listed and didn't realize it, or client was submitting to multiple wrong categories

Research:

• Link ghouls (regarding dead links in Yahoo)

Sources:

• Why doesn't an improved competitor to dmoz arise?
  • Garnet's Note: Hutcheson is a long time (probably senior or meta-editor) DMOZ editor who contributed to the thread. I remember his posts from years ago in the DMOZ discussion forum were among my favorites: "DMOZ exists to serve it's visitors" and then clearly indicating ODP feels no burden to webmasters for the visits and contributions they make. The dirty secret is that DMOZ traffic figures are propped up dramatically by webmasters coming back to the site to see if they've been listed. It's possible almost no one else cares about DMOZ, or that their traffic would collapse if not for the traffic from frustrated webmasters.
  • Other Hutcheson contributed threads:
    • Use of different tools such as search, wiki, directories