RN
Milestone posts are a strange genre. They are written to celebrate, so they read as reporting while functioning as advertising, and the numbers in them are the part readers remember and the part nobody ever checks.
This page has been kept because the 2018 original is worth something — just not the thing it was written to be worth. Stripped of the figures, what remains is a clear statement of what a directory was for, and that is a subject with more in it than a birthday.
What the original claimed, and why none of it appears here
The 2018 post carried a daily visitor total, a count of listed sites, a count of categories, a founding date and a statement of advertising policy. Every one of those was the site describing itself.
None could be independently verified. Self-reported traffic in this industry is notoriously elastic — it depends on which measure is used, whether it counts visits or people, and which of several possible sources it came from, none of which the post named. Catalogue and category counts move constantly and are trivially inflated by how you choose to count. A founding date rests on nothing but the same page asserting it.
So they are gone, rather than repeated with a hedge attached. A number restated with "the site says" still travels as a number, and this page would rather have a hole in it than an unchecked figure.
The premise, which was the actually interesting part
Underneath all that was one idea, stated plainly: the problem is not scarcity, it is navigation. There is a great deal of material and no good way to find the part of it you want.
That framing has aged better than anything else in the post. It is also the reason directories exist at all in a market where search engines nominally solve discovery. Search in this category is dominated by whoever is best at acquiring traffic, which correlates weakly with whoever has what you are looking for. A curated index competes on a different axis — it can say what something is rather than what ranks — and that is a genuine service when it is done honestly.
The word doing the work in that sentence is honestly, and it is where the whole model lives or dies.
What a directory owes a reader
Any index of paid services faces the same structural tension: the sites being ranked are also, in the ordinary business model of this category, the parties with an interest in the ranking. That is not an accusation about anyone in particular. It is the shape of the industry, and it is why the useful questions to ask of any directory — this one included — are procedural rather than moral.
Does it disclose how it is funded? Does a listing state when it was last checked? Does it ever say a site is not worth paying for, and does it say so about sites in the same commercial relationship as the ones it praises? Does the criticism have specifics in it, or is every entry warm in the same way?
A reader can answer all of those from the pages themselves in about five minutes, which is a better use of time than reading anybody's mission statement — including a mission statement written on an anniversary.
What the post is good evidence of
Two things, and they are worth keeping.
The first is that the project was explicit about the job it was doing, and that job was curation rather than hosting. A directory that owns nothing it lists has a different set of incentives from a platform that owns everything it shows you, and being clear about which one you are reading is genuinely useful.
The second is more of an artefact. Read now, the 2018 post is a small record of what this corner of the internet assumed about itself before several of the things that reshaped it — the platform content purges, the payment-processor pressure that followed, the shift of audience and money toward performer-run subscriptions. None of that is in the post, because none of it had happened. That absence is more informative than the figures were.
The honest version of an anniversary
A project surviving is a real thing and worth noting. It is not evidence of quality, reach or integrity, and the only reason milestone posts imply otherwise is that they are written by the people being congratulated.
The useful test is the same on the fifth year as on the first: pick a listing at random, check whether what it says matches what you find, and see whether it was willing to write anything discouraging. That is worth more than any number a site publishes about itself.