Maybe we need a categorized, hand curated directory of sites that users can submit their own sites to for inclusion and categorization. Maybe like an open directory. Perhaps Mozilla could operate it, or maybe Yahoo!
It could look something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20000302042007/http://www1.yahoo...
You could even add the ability to discuss these links, and add a similar voting system to those discussions.
Feels like accepting user content no longer flies on the web in 2022 due to the effectiveness of bot spam and lack of viable countermeasures :-/
Could probably back it off some human-readable format in a git repo or something, pull requests might help with moderation, and recruiting volunteers might be easier if the data is open and available/forkable for other projects.