I can point you to an excellent summary. It's the sticky Dmoz 101: Background on the Open Directory Project thread immediately above yours (at the time of writing).
If you want me to keep it brief Dmoz is nothing but a very huge web directory. Do you know what a web directory is?
dmoz is some directory pretending to be "open" but in reality being totally shady and obscure. they even got dumped by the internet dictator google recently lol
it doesn't look like it will bring any traffic in, frankly. 4 million websites compete for 0.01% of world's pageviews that are on dmoz, so what is all the fuss about
It's not just about the direct traffic - DMOZ is a massive authority website with a massive trust rating, PR8 on the home page, and a lot of inner pages with PR as well. A link on DMOZ will help boost your search engine rankings, bringing you more organic search traffic.
Around a year ago Google stopped suggesting people submit to directories (and used to say the ODP by name), a couple of weeks ago, they turned off their DMOZ clone. So as for MASSIVE authority, that is no longer the case... it's really no more or less important then any other directory.
that certainly adds to the conversation, thanks for sharing! I certainly hope people give you red like I have for bumping 30 threads to say NOTHING in them!
DMOZ is designed to build categories for those people who want to search the internet using categorised and collated data it never had any interest in promoting sites for site owners or any value a listing might add to a site. The editors are hobbyists editing in their spare time for free and building categories is one of their hobbies much like people collect stamps. As to Google, some of us are pleased they no longer clone us as it might mean we get a lot less sites being offered from site owners where the site does not meet up to our guidelines in the forlorn hope that it might get listed. That would save editor time where an editor chooses to use the suggestions pool as a data source.
Yes we are now pleased that the site that used to make us relevant no longer thinks we are relevant. The editors are hobbyists editing in their spare time for free and building categories is one of their hobbies much like people collect stamps. But since Google could care less about DMOZ we will probably go back to collecting stamps as that is more satifying then editing this encyclopedia that no one opens anymore.