Coolcases, much of what you say about motives is no doubt true. Marketing is not a field that attracts creatures with a propensity for sincere speech.
But ... and this may be a difficult point to express to persons who ARE interested primarily in profit, and who WILL take personal umbrage at decisions made about their personal, potentially profitable business -- we have a focus.
We aren't about webmasters. The webmaster may be as vicious as Janet Reno or as vacuous as Janet Jackson; she be teaching greed to Bill Gates and rudeness to Wallace Sanford. Or ... he might be singlehandedly forcing the Pope to reconsider the tradition of not canonizing people before death.
It doesn't matter, not in the very least little bit. We don't judge, we don't look at personal motives. (A good thing, too, because we simply don't have adequate information to judge well.)
Now, putting aside our personal opinions of the ancestry, intelligence, ethics, courtesy, and social utility of the webmaster, what's left?
Not their business model: "We don't care about business model" is a traditional ODP proverb. This is worth repeating: regardless of how deeply we despise the MLM racket, we don't reject sites because their owners are MLM scum!
We reject sites because they don't have enough unique content. MLM promotional material isn't unique content -- like any other advertising, promotion, noise, or distraction on the site, it counts as a negative. But it isn't a disqualification. What is the absolute disqualification is lack of unique content.
Now, MLMers are nothing if not persistent -- THAT racket doesn't attract shrinking violets! So they attempt to manipulate us by disguising their advertising as other things -- "shopping directories", "consumer information sites", "personal pages", and so on. As you see.
What you may not have yet seen is that economic selfishness is not the only focus that can add persistence to a personality. The ODP was formed around an ideal, "to make information available freely to people." And, if you lift your eyes above the pathological creatures scrabbling and squabbling in the mud for loose change, there's a whole world of genuinely human activity based around the exchange of ideas. Prophets, authors, teachers, scientists, parents, ... why, even MLM is at its very worst not a genuine evil, but simply a diabolical perversion of the human desire to propagate useful information: and salesmanship (no matter how vile many of its common manifestations) is at its best simply identifying human needs and human capabilities, and matching them up. But the point is, EVEN WITHOUT BEING PAID, humans do this thing.
I'm in the Information Technology business. I get paid for telling people stuff -- different jobs, different information exchanged: but that theme is recurrent. I like doing that. I'd do it for free. I, um, do do it for free. And that attracted me to the ODP.
So, on one side we have the MLM spammers, willing to do almost anything to get a hindclaw up in that scrum in the muck, trying to manipulate the ODP. On the other side, we have the ODP editors, carefully NOT telling people how to do websites, but also being very explicit about what types of websites can hope for whatever promotion an ODP listing gives. How much actual information can a MLMer be manipulated into putting on a website? The ones with the most information might get listings.
Who's manipulating whom here? Both sides are constantly re-evaluating their methods in the light of their own missions....
Generally, the result of this process is (from our point of view) that the quality of available (and ODP-indexed) content slowly rises as webmasters work harder to make competitive sites. And, from the outside, the perspective is that new unlisted sites are often better than old listed sites. But don't jump to the conclusion that it's just favoritism. It is that four years ago, our standards had to be lower because there was less information available -- and those sites are getting publicity now because they were leading lemmings back then. This isn't just an ODP limitation: any index, no matter how implementd, will always lag the actual data. It is, however, an opportunity for us.
So: if you're willing to give examples of what you think of as the least informative of the article-disguised MLM sites, some editor will probably be willing to re-review them according to something more like current standards. And do we care whether you're doing it just to scuttle the competition?
No. we thank you for your help.
Who's manipulating whom?
