There have been greater than 80 000 editors that have worked on the project since the begining, and the number of current active is claimed to be around 7000.
People feel passionate about finding and promoting the best sites in their categories. They keep them spam-free and up to date. Not all sites listed have been submitted - editors can add sites they find through other sources. Oh, and you could be an editor too? Consider signing up
One of the ways they got so big was to automatically populate categories with sites owned by it's founding editors. They were also one of the first directories...and directories pre-date decent search engines by some time... so before there was a fantastic resource like Google, there was DMOZ...and at the time it was the best way to find a site related to a given subject (category). The fact that it was one of the first and the best in it's day for finding what was needed has carried the hype to this day...
The popularity is also perpetuated by other major search engines who continue to use it as a source of data.
Where do you think Google and other search engines collect data from? I am not privy to all of Google's algorithms but I do know that they use data from ODP as part of the mix. In fact they update on a regular basis from ODP. The last being this month in fact.
DMOZ existed before the creation of Google. The requirement for reciprocal links simply did not exist when DMOZ was created. Google has created a long-term fad for reciprocal links. DMOZ has ignored that fad. Ignore fads, stick to the core objectives, and get popular. It's that simple.
In the 2nd post in this thread Secret Squirrel said.. ODP IS THE "FASTEST GROWING" DIRECTORY? ROFL. Tried to offer him a chance to fix that (by a green note even). It's pretty damned funny, but of course it is total horse shit. Check the archives, do the math. ODP had 4.863 million this time last year, about 4.6 mil this year. A directory with a net decrease of over a quarter of a million sites is not "the fastest growing directory". Mathematically impossible. ODP editors are hereby notified future silly unsupported claims (here and elsewhere) will be met with documentation to the contrary. You will be held to the truth. Might I mention that BOTW added over 20,000 sites last month? Do the work if you want the glory, otherwise quit posing for the cameras. Our guys aren't talking about being the fastest growing directory... just doing it. Oh yeah... Have a nice day. ~ Rob
Forum signatures are a great place for spiders. This thread getting bumped will likely get spidered before an updated category. There are many other faster methods of getting links then from a rather slow moving directory such as DMOZ. Yeah, yeah, it has a BUNCH of links, but come on, how long have most of those been there. Not much good for spider food if the place does not change for months or even years on end.