But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.
I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.
I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back.
Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!
It might just be observation bias but it seems to me that personal websites and blogs are coming back at least for the kinds of people that might have had one in the old web. Perhaps the trend won't wash over the whole web but having a subculture that is at least as large as the old web would be great, no?
Regarding the lifetime of a site, it might be possible to submit requests to the Internet Archive or similar service whenever a site is added to a directory or a new post is found on it. That way too, it would be easier to see when a site is no longer active or when it turned into something else. Then, when it's deactivated, the web directory could just point to the archive first
I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like spam filters are trained today.
But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.
I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.