It's not just the appearance.
There IS a rising bar, and it's no secret: I've mentioned it often enough, in every forum I visit, especially with respect to guides and directories. The first lemming down the lane gets attention from the naturalists, the ecologists, the biologists: the teachers let school out so everyone can see it. The thousandth lemming attracts only the local exterminator. By the ten thousandth lemming, schools are being closed so the children can help kill them. And that's as it ought to be, and as it must be for society to survive.
And it is also easier to stay listed than it is to get listed. If a site is already listed, the presumption is that at some point it was worth listing -- if it's now "borderline", we'll leave it if we re-review, out of respect for the other editor's decision. And even if a site is below the new border, it may survive unnoticed for months. Only if it's WAY below the new border will we drop everything and let school out to hunt it down again. This is also both as it ought to be, and as it must be, for several reasons:
-- Directories favor "large, stable" sites: both for reasons of internal efficiency and in respect to a site's established reputation. A site that may not be as large, and yet has demonstrated stability over, say, five years, has an inherent value that a new site cannot possibly have.
-- Part of maintaining a community of workers is to show consideration for each other's judgment. If a site is now considered "borderline", the fact that it once was considered worth listing can and ought to swing the balance.
-- Editors quite properly focus on reviewing more sites, not on constant monitoring of sites that are already listed.
-- From an information-theoretic point of view, a site that is different from others is more unique than all of its imitators, and deserves a more favorable review. A site whose only claim is that "other sites with the same content are ALREADY listed" -- is missing the point of "unique content" rather badly.
In this, as in everything, we represent the viewpoint of the surfer. The first site of a kind has a special value which is diminished (but not totally destroyed) by imitators.
I should mention that you say "commercial websites" -- but commercial sites can get listed as easily now as they ever could! It's the "ADVERTISING websites" that do two things: (1) in deceptively masquerading as commercial sites, they force us to be more suspicious of all commercial sites, and (2) in wasting our time in spam-whacking operations, they take editor time that would otherwise have been gladly devoted to reviewing and listing good commercial sites. The confusion is all the greater because many commercial sites have significant self-advertising verbiage, which we tolerate for the sake of their unique information. So your typical marketroidish toxic cyanobacterium, incapable of either seeing or spreading INFORMATION and only interested in propagating ADVERTISING, sees this advertising, doesn't see the reality and the unique information underneath, and goes off whining that the ODP is "favoring his competition." But it's not. It's favoring real businesses with real information in their websites, and he's not ever going to be competing with them except in his paranoid fantasies.
