Sometime in the late 1990s I became a DMOZ editor for my local area. At that time, when the internet was a nieche thing and I was still a kid, I was actually operating a web site that had a similar goal as the corresponding category for a non-profit organization.

In the following years, I would occasionally log in, try to review some pages. It was a really scary experience: it was still exactly the same, web 0.5 experience. You had a spreadsheet type of view, tons of buttons, and it would take like 10 page loads to just review a single site. A lot of the time, you would end up search a more appropriate category, copy the URL, replace some URL-encoded special characters, paste it in one out of 30 fields on the form just to move the suggested site to a more appropriate category. Most of the edits would be by bots that detected a dead link and disabled it by moving it to the review stage. While at the same time, every SEO manual said you need to be listed on DMOZ, so people would mass-submit all kinds of stuff to DMOZ in any category that it could in any way fit in.

Then AOL announced DMOZ 2.0. And everybody probably thought: about time to refresh the UI and make everything more usable. But it didn’t. First of all, it came late (announced in 2008, actually delivered sometime in 2010), then it was incredibly buggy in the beginning. They re-launched 2.0 at least two times. For quite some time, editors would be unable to login.

When DMOZ 2.0 came, my account was already “inactive”, but I was able to get it re-activated. And it still looked the same. I read they changed from Times to Arial, and probably changed some CSS. But other than that, it was still as complicated to edit links as you could make it. So I did just a few changes then lost interest largely again.

During the last year I must have tried to give it another try multiple times. But my account had expired again, and I never got a reply to my reinstatement request.

A year ago finall Google Directory - the most prominent use of DMOZ/ODP data, although the users were totally unaware of it - was discontinued, too.

So by now, DMOZ seems to be as dead as it can get (they don’t even bother to answer former contributors that want to get reinstated). The links are old, and if it weren’t for bots to disable dead sites, it would probably look like an internet graveyard. But this poses an interesting question: will someone come up with a working “web 2.0 social” idea of the “directory” concept (I’m not talking about Digg and these classic “social bookmarking” dead ducks)? Something that strikes the right balance of on one hand the web page admins (and the SEO gold diggers) being allowed to promote their sites (and keep the data accurate) and at the same time crowd-sourcing the quality control, while also opening the data? To some extend, Facebook and Google+ can do this, but they’re largely walled gardens. But they don’t have real social quality assurance; money is key there.