I rejected their offer and reported the abuse.
Good, that's one problem less for all of us to worry about.
I simply assumed that DMOZ gives weight to quality web sites and not to persons.
But how can you know, without looking first, whether a website is "quality" or not?
A fairer statement would be "DMOZ gives weight to 'at-least-adequate sites' which are found by methods considered likely to find sites with unique content."
(Considered by whom? Well, by the people who have most experience in trying different methods of finding unique contributions to the web.)
Allow me to say that I feel that it is not fair. Or do you disagree?
Everyone has their own definition of "fair". My own definition would be that every website should be prioritized based on the subject knowledge presented, not on how much the owner knows about self-promotion or site-promotion.
Admittedly, the ODP is horribly unfair--people who know more about site promotion have a big advantage.
But here you come face to face with the Cuban Medical Care syndrome: if you only have two bucks a year per capita to spend on medical care, what does it matter how evenly ("fairly"
) it's distributed? What you need to do is improving EFFICIENCY and/or increasing the BUDGET. Hiring storm troopers to keep everyone stand in a "perfectly equitable line" (by some psychopathic dictator's definition) until they get medical care or (far more likely) die, is ... a 100% waste of all the money spent on storm trooper bullets and billets.
The ODP takes a different approach. What matters is (1) improving the efficiency of the (volunteer) workforce, and (2) increasing the value added by what work is done.
This is handled by (1) letting each volunteer choose where to focus, and (2) letting each volunteer choose how to look for sites.
This means each volunteer can focus on a category where his work makes a difference he can see--a topic that is both inherently interesting to at least one surfer, and where unique information is not as well represented as at least one volunteer thinks it could be.
I doubt if information about website promoting is all that hard to find on the web; I'm sure it's of interest primarily to a very small group of very-competitive professionals who tend NOT to engage in voluntary cooperation: in other words, who mostly don't fit into the ODP community.
Hence, their interests are neglected by the ODP community. But, after all, is that UNFAIR to them? Or is that unfair to the ODP community, which receives so little benefit from professionals in that field--so much less time volunteered than from so many other kinds of professionals?
No, there's no unfairness involved. Everyone involved is free to offer help--to any website, not just dmoz.org. Every website is free to accept help from anyone who offers. Everyone offers what they think is most important; everyone accepts what they think is most valuable.
That's freedom. And freedom can be better than "fair": it can be "generous". "Fair" could NEVER have built an Open Directory, a Project Gutenberg, a Wikipedia, a Cyberhymnal. But "generosity" did.
