We all know of things online which we consider to be the best of a category. The best YouTube channel on mathematics, the best blog about marketing, the best Twitter about painting, the best website of essays, etc. This idea is for a simple website where users submit and vote on suggestions for the best resource in various categories. While the site focuses on the best and places it prominently, the runner ups would be displayed too. And while the best is considered a permanent, time-independent position, new entrants can of course be voted to number one.
There are two dimensions to the data of this site: domain and category. Domains are for example blogs, Wikipedia pages, podcasts or YouTube channels. Categories are for example laptops, personal firewall software, restaurants in NYC or AI venture funds. While domains shall be taken from a closed list of one or two dozen terms, categories are unlimited and provided by the user when submitting a new entry. Existing categories can be suggested, but nothing prohibits a user from creating a new one.
This new type of submit-and-vote website would fill a niche in the Web content ecosystem. Reddit finds the temporarily most interesting links, and moves them down over time. Wikipedia provides long-term authoritative sources, which grow in maturity over time. Search engines index websites of any age according to search terms and rank them by algorithm. But why not simply vote for the permanent best in each domain and category?
The technology for this site is straight-forward: a web app with a database back end, a search component and a good SEO concept. The hard part is to get the UX subtly right, to entice users to share their own ideas of what is best and of course, to vote. Also important is fighting spammers and voting rings, sham accounts and so on. If the site becomes anyhow popular, these will pop up and try to sway the vote in favor of their paying customers at the expense of this site’s operators.