In my personal view, DMOZ was the first conceptual attempt at a somewhat democratic link building with a kind of "wiki-like" approach.
Because of...
- Poor customer service;
- Biased review process;
- Corrupt editors;
- Careless admins;
- Submission backlog.
...the whole project hasn't grown up gracefully, like it was initially intended to.
For now, it's a bloated, outdated and largely biased link repository that I fail to find relevant, 95% of the time.
Nevertheless, I give an A+ for the founding principles behind DMOZ.