Topsites like this one were extremely popular in the late 90s, the problem, which most sites caught on to was the entire nature of the system. To get a good ranking I have to link to their site and drive traffic to them. It doesn't matter if my site is 500 times larger than the #1 site, if they put up a big banner on their homepage they can easily outrank me if all I have is a little link (ot in our case, no link at all).
Ultimately there is no real reason why I would want to send traffic to a site with no meaningful content -- it doesn't benefit me as the webmaster and it certainly doesn't benefit the community. ScubaBoard is a big site but we are not the only one, you don't see Sport Diver, ScubaDiving.Com, PADI or pretty much any other major site on those rankings for all of the reasons I listed (and more).
Certainly top lists have some purpose and are entertaining but these aren't rating sites... they don't rate anything other than the number of people you send to them and I'd much rather send people to an interesting, informative site.
Ultimately there is no real reason why I would want to send traffic to a site with no meaningful content -- it doesn't benefit me as the webmaster and it certainly doesn't benefit the community. ScubaBoard is a big site but we are not the only one, you don't see Sport Diver, ScubaDiving.Com, PADI or pretty much any other major site on those rankings for all of the reasons I listed (and more).
Certainly top lists have some purpose and are entertaining but these aren't rating sites... they don't rate anything other than the number of people you send to them and I'd much rather send people to an interesting, informative site.
I wonder how many posts he has on the other board???
