Thread: DMOZ Sucks

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

The difference between Wikipedia and DMOZ is that Wikia defaults to open and DMOZ defaults to closed.

The result is that Wikipedia has an unimaginably enormous amount of content and quite impressively high quality, while DMOZ is representing and increasingly smaller percentage of the web and the site selection is poor.

DMOZ made themselves irrelevant with their own poor choices.

There is an old saying that goes something like this: "If one person tells you you're a donkey, ignore them. If two people tell you you're a donkey, check for a tail."

You can respond with hostiliy to every person who posts about the failure of DMOZ -- but that won't actually accomplish anything. It doesn't convince anyone, because it doesn't fix DMOZ. If you really want to improve DMOZ's public reputation, improve DMOZ.

Will, I think you should look back at your posts to see who responds with hostility. I have asked you before for any evidence you have about your statements about DMOZ and its sites, but you failed to provide any. Once again in this post you attempt to put DMOZ down without any evidence.

That's an interesting post about the donkey, the fact that hundreds of people still q and seemingly are still willing even to pay to get into DMOZ, says to you that they are ignorant of its uselessnss, but by your story, it would seem we have hundreds and thousands of people telling us we are a success. You seem to be in the minority of the few peo;ple who can't get a site listed, have been booted as an editor or failed with an application to become an editor. Now when people who have a grudge tell me that the object of that grudge is a failure, I do tend not to take their comments too seriously. That group of people is not the public, never will be, just a bunch of people with a chip on their shoulders. Like most things people who are viciferous usually have a complaint, I believe that what editors can do is to rty and tell those people whose expectations are unreal why they have a problem.

The object of Wiki and DMOZ are really quite different with diferent material, my pooint was that Wiki is becoming more and more closed as it discovers the vandalism that some people perpetrate and DMOZ is more vulknerable because people do want to be listed and get their sites listed, Wiki does not seek to collect URL's and lists them only to back up their information.

It's always interesting to me when people comments on things like poor site choice, one asks which site did we not list that belonged to the writer and its always easy to critise when not participating. I am always amazed when watching a football match how many of the specatators are experts and how they know infininately more than the high paid sportsman on the field. Until one gives them the ball. Though sometimes one then discpvers the spectators were players once and they took bribes, so the present players are dead useless.

I am a volunteer editopr at DMOZ my opinions are my own and do not represent DMOZ or staff.

Do you want examples Anonymously?

Well, get to dmoz and search for "car tuning", then get to the first 50 results and tell me how many are better than any of my tuning sites (cartuningcentral.com for example).

Also, let me know how many are still online.

Do you want more?

Search for "Jesse Owens" and compare the results with jesseowens.info

Even more?

Search for "Gisele Bundchen" and compare the results with any of my Gisele sites (giselebundchen.net is a good example)

I could go endless here.

You seem to want to assume that we have endless staff working endless hours. Why are you bleating about what is not listed when you lift not a finger as an editor?

One day an editor may work in that area and add further sites. But Will seems to suggest that the poor site choice is a sort of deliberate exclusion, and I feel that in what you have said.

This is the sort of comment I mean

The Tech-FAQ has an Alexa of 4,502 and it's not good enough to be listed in DMOZ.

which makes the assumption that a deliberate choice was made not to list the site because it was not good enough. I would like to know how Will knows that, because it is not listed does not mean that it has been rejected, only that an editor has not listed it yet. We do not claim that every category we have has as many sites as it should, we wish. If we turned off submissions and had every editor working on the submissions we would net get through in months or even years. And as you know we do not do that, we are not merely there to satisfy submitters or even do we boast that we have every site worth listing, this is our hobby, not a mechanistic process.

You too seem to think that we should be at your beck and call, you may or may not have better sites, but we are not editors to jump too because you feel your sites should be listed.

I do not claim that we have every site listed that is worthwhile, mainly becuase we as an editing community recognise that most sites on the internet and most offered are listable according to our criteria, which is why I say that sites are often not rejected just not been reviewed and as a community, working these issues we are not minded to start running a police state to tell people how much they have to work, how often they have to work, where they have to work or what resources they have to use. Doing that would have spelt the death nell years ago. That might please some, but do remmeber, as Will said, when two people tell you something you listen and hundrends and thousands tell us that DMOZ is doing a good job because they use our material and offer sites. That is despite the fact that, for me, those statistics are no reason for me continuing as an editor. I love the collecting, colating and seeing sites grouped. I do not have a site on the web, so I do not keep my site listed.

You may not like the result, but contrary to what Will says earlier, we do seem to have people who want to use our material directly and indirectly on clone sites.

If anyone spots any sites that do not return there is a button to advice us, we are grateful for the help of those who use the service in this way. We do have bots that check, but sometimes some sites get through both that net and our own checks.

I am a DMOZ editor but my opinions are my own and do not represent staff or the directory

The Tech-FAQ is an excellent example of a site that's old and fairly worthwhile and yet DMOZ can't seem to find it even though it's in their submission queue.

The purpose of a directory is to list quality web sites. DMOZ accomplishes that purpose extremely poorly. This makes DMOZ a failure -- as a directory.

In other ways, DMOZ is a success. Obviously you're enamored with it as a way to spend your time. Bravo! I'm glad you have a hobby you enjoy. Other editors are making a decent amount of money selling listings. Good for them too! They get paid and people get their sites listed. I'm happy for everyone involved. Other people like to clone the DMOZ directory to create MFA (Made For AdSense) sites to spam the web. I'm happy for them too! Hopefully the AdWords advertisers are seeing some sort of RoI for the clickthroughs they are paying for -- and I'm sure that Google is enjoying their percentage of the AdSense revenue also.

But let's not try to pretend that DMOZ is not a complete failure as a directory of quality sites on the web. A little intellectual honesty is called for here.

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

The purpose of a directory is to list quality web sites. DMOZ accomplishes that purpose extremely poorly. This makes DMOZ a failure -- as a directory.

I will skip over the unproven allegations about editors taking money, I am pleased to say that in my 10 years of being with DMOZ I have only met hardowrking dedicated editors who were honest. I also repeat that if anyone is asked for money or pays money for a listing, please report them to us, if we do have a wrotten aplle we will root them out, but we need your help. Apart from the fact that who would want to pay to a directory that is no good, according to you, but comment that it is easy to make some unfounded allegations, then build a house on them. The one I have quoted is one such from your repertoire. You are of course entitled to your opinion, do you remember the Dirty Harry movie that said "opinions are like *****holes, everyones got one"? But it is an opinion. It is also slightly askew, the purpose of DMOZ is to list websites with unique content and quality in that sense, but not neccessary how many webmasters want to define quality. Secondly it is to list the web sites its editors feel they want to list, when seeking to build up a particular category designed for end users and not designed for listing sites for any value that might add to the site.

We still are the largest human edited directory on the internet with about 5 million links categorised, but that is a tiny fraction of the web sites on the internet, it is therefore quite logical that there are millions of sites we would still like to list. Can I again remind you that you told me that when two people told you something you should take that seriously, well thousands tell us how well we do it, or they would want to be listed in other directories and Google would not want to use us. You might feel that is bad judgement by the users and Google, but remember your story, it really is a very true and usefull anecdote.

Can I just ask you again which of the three applies
A site we have not listed for you
You applied to be an editor and refused
You were an editor and got booted?

I am a DMOZ editor but my opinions are my own, they do not represent staff or the directory.

Originally Posted by Anonymously

I will skip over the unproven allegations about editors taking money

What do you need as a proof? A paypal receipt?
An email offering that service?

Come on, everyone knows about that and knows at least 1 editor that does it...

It just seems bizarre to bury your head in the sand and loudly proclaim "nothing is wrong" when the truth of the matter is that DMOZ has failed and will continue to be a failure unless massive management and cultural changes are made within the organization.

If you really just enjoy categorizing sites, why not start your own directory (preferably a niche directory) or volunteer at a large directory like BOTW? There's really no sense in investing more of your life into a failed project and then trolling forums looking for people to defend that failed project against.

Originally Posted by Shenron

What do you need as a proof? A paypal receipt?
An email offering that service?

Come on, everyone knows about that and knows at least 1 editor that does it...

To become a senior editor to be able to edit in any category, and if one can't offer to list anywhere, who would bother, one has to be an editor for a considerable time, often in excess of 20000 edits, that takes time and devotion. All that to blow it for a few dollars, how long do you think bent editors can last? How long before a site listed gets de-listed by another editor and the peed off person who paid blows the whistle? I accept that we have had and will have editors who do that, but they are few and far between. Junior editors who do list themselves and nobody else, more likely, but they are watched and likely to be found out. On a massive scale. never.

Will said

It just seems bizarre to bury your head in the sand and loudly proclaim "nothing is wrong" when the truth of the matter is that DMOZ has failed and will continue to be a failure unless massive management and cultural changes are made within the organization.

If you really just enjoy categorizing sites, why not start your own directory (preferably a niche directory) or volunteer at a large directory like BOTW? There's really no sense in investing more of your life into a failed project and then trolling forums looking for people to defend that failed project against.

Could you tell me the criteria that it has failed against, because to fail you have to miss your targets. Quotes from DMOZ site about objectives will be acceptable. You may believe it has failed, refer to my earlier comments about opinions, but, sorry to keep reminding you, as you told us earlier if two or more people tell you something and hundred tell us we suceed. But I debate that as a mute point. We did not set up to get used by Google or downloaded by thousands, we set up to serve the purpose of human editing a directory of unique content sites to serve people who wanted such a directory, we have produced the largest such. Where have we missed our targets and thus failed?

As I have said to you, my objective is not to debate success or failure, you pose the questions, I don't solicit them but I am more than happy to try and help people to understand why their sites don't get listed in the way they expect, when their expectations are guided by wrong understandings, to try and help people who want to become editors etc.

As to editing for a clone of DMOZ who substantially uses DMOZ trained editors like BOTW I am on record as saying that I do not want to edit as anything other than a hobby and certainly not for a few cents an edit that BOTW pays to ex-DMOZ editors. If DMOZ goes into paid submission or paid editors I will be the first of many to press the resign button. How many of BOTW editors come onto any forum, Mr Jones excepted, to make any comment about BOTW (and mostly he commented about DMOZ at DP), perhaps they are scared of getting fired for any comments, but I have said that my vote was and always will be to turn suggestions off at DMOZ.

I am an ODP editor but my opinions are my own and do not represent DMOZ directory or staff.