I believe that creating a site with links to websites you like, builds a more robust web. Of course for that to be valuable, you need to have actually appreciated the quality of the sites, give the links descriptions, and best, say something about the sites that help people who visit your site a consistent manner of opinion.
Some history: It’s easy to think of being “on-line” today and forget that the “Web” referred to the idea that individuals referring to each other’s resources on computers accessible via a network actually created more than the resources laying there on their own.
Search engines like Google gave the average Internet user a big leap forward from earlier methods. (Google wasn’t the first…Alta Vista and others paved the path) In the early days, you would find one interesting site, and find other interesting site from there. Social network companies, connecting people and letting people who don’t have websites easily share things (well there were subject forums first) are also vital to today’s connected nature. Then there are the walled garden, publications and curated sources like AOL was in the old days, then Yahoo, and to some degree news publications to the extent they share links.
Blogs found their own place early and provided many a link source 15 years ago, and while they still link to articles in the course of their commentary, too few blog writers index web content or sites they’ve liked as they may have done in the past.
When we index content we both help search engines by giving real sites a stamp of legitimacy, but we also provide ways where people who appreciate our opinions or are on a determined “surf expedition” can find sites that the search engines algorithms over look, or who have lost favor via associations etc.
While the large websites have yet to fall into politically silencing activities, if you’re a creature of history and don’t believe we’re a changed species, there will be movements like McCarthyism in the future … already in the name of prevention of terrorism we can hear a drum-beat against completely free expression beginning to take form.