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Comment by sebst | Hacker News Reader

I asked former editors of DMOZ if they would like to continue working on a human edited directory.

100 of them replied with mixed emotions, but nearly all of them are willing to contribute to the development of a DMOZ successor.

So, I build a platform (just a forum and a wiki at the moment) to collect all these likeminded people and start building something great together.

Tell me what you think about humanly curated web directories in 2017 or your ambitions to be a user or a contributor of a decent successor of the ODP.

Thank you for your feedback!

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Starting from the other end, who would use a DMOZ successor?

Clearly DMOZ hasn't been getting a lot of real user traffic, which I think is because newer users (that's most users) have only ever used search, never been introduced to the concept of a directory.

So, the focus should be on who it's being built for, and how they would find and use it, rather than just replicating something from a different era.

For example, it could be a blog where guest bloggers (or blogger teams) each submit a carefully edited post describing the top sites (and perhaps apps) in a niche, and what's good about them. And then keep the posts up to date.

Quality could be maintained by a moderating team that only accepts the best posts, and ensures that they are maintained (otherwise deleted).

The resulting post when found in a search engine would be more readable, and probably more useful, than a directory listing page.

In my opinion you're 100% right!

Those challenges are real and a new version cannot be just a clone of dmoz.

AI/recommender systems could play a role in such a project, the relationship between discovery of new stuff and finding resources on already known topics has to be discussed and so on...

I invite you to bring in your ideas here or in the curlz.org forum.

humanly curated web directories

The word you're looking for is "portal."

Nah. The most common meaning of portal from when I last recall it being used was: "humanly curated selection of auto-updating RSS-fed content boxes with content from other sites".

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