Ask HN: Complete and Great Directory of Websites?

  • I can't help you with any suggestion for a better list. Most I've seen start out very promising and good intentions, and fail after a while, it's been 10 years or more since I've run across a half decent curated list project.

    There have been IIRC a few good attempts over the years to create sizeable publicly accessible curated list with or without registration, and for a time looked like a success to be had, but given a couple years the momentum was mostly lost until the site stagnates, lingers and folds. Very small limited curated lists still exist in good numbers within forums mainly for the membership being committed to their shared and focused interests.

    I'd guess the reason the momentum dies off and finally stagnates is whichever list stopped being important enough to maintain by the core of its users. While search engine difficulties are often blamed on the ever expanding web surface, proliferation of too many to count spam-worthy sites popping up, as well as the vast about of data that needs to be scraped and perhaps cached, more than anything there exists the issue of more and more web sites being non friendly to search bots and those who don't meet a prerequisite - the latter of non friendly being why the allure for curated lists eventually start to die off, whatever url listed isn't useful for everyone, resulting in the same unpleasant experience search engines can have -- for example the url being only accessible for those in the USA or some other location. The web has long forgot it's supposed to be WWW, not those who can afford the latest or live in the right area.

    The web could be easier but so many sites don't even include a proper If no JavaScript then this replacement instance.