Here is my point: Don't treat directories as the ones you used to see which are made solely for seo and tricking the search engines. You all know Google is seeking for relevant and websites of quality. Treat a directory as a website, a website can bring something good to the user, why couldn't a directory be the same! So thank you Google to make the thing harder for poor quality websites and poor directories. To the dir. owners: Make your site useful Cheers.
no directories are not worthless and not becoming dead and links are valuable if you submit your site to authority websites.