Yeah, I remember talking to a student over at our local college a few years back who had started doing that with a classmate. They called it Yet Another Hierarchical... something or other. Jerry, I think his name was. I probably should have joined them. It turned out to be quite an experience.

I'm building https://learnawesome.org for this. Started by collecting various awesome lists and then adding search, reviews, related items etc. For eg, when looking up a book, you can easily discover the TED talk or podcast given by the author which has the same ideas.

It's early days though. I imported around 10,000 MOOCs from various platforms and organized them by topics. The webapp is open-source so fixes/features are always welcome. :)

I remember dmoz! Nowadays any curated list would need to have the properties of (a) being publicly editable and (b) being prose, because for the time being it's sufficiently difficult for machines to write prose. Or at least, I assume so, since everything popular except wikipedia has been gamed.

That's what search engines used to be in the early days of the internet.