That would be very helpful, but it would be a lot of work.
Might as well go all the way and be maximally ambitious: A modernized internet directory that functions as an alternative to Google would be a very welcome thing, in this day and age. I have some ideas for how that thing could work.
A human-reviewed and curated list that's comprehensive, searchable (everything on the list is indexed, nothing off the list is indexed,) and ad-free. Businesses who aren't on the directory, but would like to be, pay an application fee. The huge secondary industry that sprung up around DMOZ indicates that this business model would work.
There'd be more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.
I'd love to find enough people who would like to work on such a thing.
You've already set yourself up for poor incentives, if someone is profiting off letting people in. It is not curated content if people are buying their way in. And if people are not buying their way in, you are setting up an elite class of users - the curators.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's impossible for human curators to catch everything, as crawlers do. Lots of companies are inevitably going to be left off the list because their website is #2,000,000 in the world & they occupy some industrial niche. Those companies, should they want in, would not be buying entry, but applying for entry, and their application would be reviewed in accordance with certain rules and other criteria.
Blogs and forums could probably apply for free.
I imagine that the still-theoretical company would (hopefully) profit, and that the curators are neutral salaried employees, rather than Wiki-style volunteers.
Salaried employees have a bias to make their employer money in order to keep those jobs. For-profit companies likewise have a bias for money. That is where all the problems started with - bias for money. There is quite a bit of social nuance to this, and coming at it wanting to make a better internet while also wanting to profit from it are difficult goals to achieve together.
I consider forums being hard to find a feature, not a bug. They aren't all exactly like they were in they heyday of forums and not immune to bots and shilling but being j-u-s-t that bit more effort keeps out a lot of the trash.
I feel like there is threshold of size when things start to go downhill. Too small is bad, too big bad too. In sense organic growth is the best for communities.
I've been working on marketing my Chrome extension too. It alerts users to when a company is offering a free sample of the item they're looking at on Amazon.
I've been posting on Reddit about it - that's gotten me a few early users and a bit of useful feedback. I am thinking about what to do next.
