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Bring Back Webrings

arne.me

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Re: Bring Back Webrings

#51

Post by dragontamer »

swatcoder wrote: post #50
dragontamer wrote: post #19

I'm fairly certain that link-aggregation sites, like Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, and Lemmy have taken the place of Webrings. The sad truth about webpages is that people don't want to maintain them. People will put in their weekend project, and then the webpage sits there for the rest of eternity whether or not its relevant, and then what? When do you update the webring so that they add and/or remove pages? H…

> maintain them Maintain what? They’re documents. They document things. As long as there’s a tool that knows how to parse the document, which is outside the role of the author, the document remains complete. There’s nothing to maintain. The contemporary fetish for timely ephemera is a quirk of social media feeds and a generation that grew up immersed in them, not some baseline criteria for how the internet needs to w…

> Maintain what?

Okay, you're kidding me right? Have you actually used Webrings?

Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links?

Answer: you can't. Its basically lost information. Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses.

There's a __reason__ why we stopped doing Webrings when Geocities stopped being popular. I've lived Geocities -> Homestead -> Xenga -> Myspace -> Facebook. At no point did anyone ever care to go back to webrings.

And suddenly here we are like 20+ years later, where people who clearly never used them are suddenly pretending that it was webrings that made the early internet great. Erm, no. I guess they were a sign of the times... but they weren't good or great by any means. We have better means of sharing links with each other today.

--------

Links die. Alarmingly quickly. Even today where people try to have long-lived links for SEO purposes and have specifically programmed scripts to help make links live longer... links still die and thus webrings break.

We didn't know how bad link-rot was at the time of webrings.

> You’ll be surprised what an untouched document from 5 or 15 or 25 years ago might reveal to you, once you can actually find them again.

Good luck. Geocities literally died. Yes, there's an entire archival process was undertaken to try to save Geocities, but I'm sure we missed some info.

Any webring pointing to a Geocities site today will absolutely 404 error out. You've already got to change all the links to point to the various archives (ex: Neocities IIRC has at least the most popular pages archived).

Now I ask: were you really around for the time of webrings?

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#53

Post by joemi »

I always found plenty of interesting websites without needing to use webrings, often from sites with a list of "other sites about [whatever this site is about]" or just "other cool websites". Such personally curated lists were far more useful to me. They were less random, they could show the title, they could even put notes about the sites, I could skip over ones that I already knew about or didn't seem relevant, and they were overall less random. Also, a huge plus for implementation side of it was that it didn't rely on anyone else except you.

Are there any advantages to having webrings instead of just lists of "other cool sites"?

edit to add: Now that I'm thinking of it, a webring is a ring (duh), but the "other cool sites" concept is a decentralized network. That to me is a huge benefit. Makes it far more robust.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#54

Post by LAC-Tech »

flyinghamster wrote: post #34
LAC-Tech wrote: post #29

Tangential, but one thing I noticed recently is how algorithms on sites like twitter and linkedin - especially linkedin - will penalize posts that contain external links. So it's very hard to even tell people about content on your own site. HN might be one of the few places left that don't seem to do that. Thinking more - what used to be common is a section called "other cool sites" or something similar, which would…

The algorithms are probably trying to fight spam, but the end result is a closed, self-referential silo.

I assume they're just trying to keep you on their domain for commercial reasons.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#55

Post by joemi »

JohnFen wrote: post #23
scottyah wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or website curators all agree on a /webring.txt file (similar to a robots.txt) where they list websites they think are similar?

An important part of what made webrings good, though, was that they were curated (some more than others, but still...) Having sites just list others the site owners think are similar is just the site providing a list of links to "friend sites" -- which also used to be a common thing. That's also fun and useful, but not what webrings are about.

I'm not sure I see the difference in curation between a webring and a "other cool sites" list, except that in the webring case there needs to be a central curator across several sites, so it's effectively just a single person's "other cool sites" list spread across several sites.

"Other cool sites" lists were quite popular back then. That's what I used for site discovery instead of webrings.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#56

Post by lakomen »

In order to "bring back webrings", one would first have to "bring back private websites", private as in not corporate owned, and not being a walled garden, like all the Meta services or X or Discord or Slack or or or.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#57

Post by swatcoder »

dragontamer wrote: post #51
swatcoder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintain them Maintain what? They’re documents. They document things. As long as there’s a tool that knows how to parse the document, which is outside the role of the author, the document remains complete. There’s nothing to maintain. The contemporary fetish for timely ephemera is a quirk of social media feeds and a generation that grew up immersed in them, not some baseline criteria for how the internet needs to w…

> Maintain what? Okay, you're kidding me right? Have you actually used Webrings? Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links? Answer: you can't. Its basically lost information. Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses. There's a __reason__ why…

> were you really around for the time of webrings?

Yup.

> Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses.

Nope. Not then, when IFRAMEs or a pre-CORS AJAX call delegated ring maintenance upstream, and not now, when we have about 1500 more ways to delegate it. Was there a short period where they were as crude as you describe? Sure, but that's not really relevant to the forward-looking discussion of what they would look like now or the backward-looking discussion of what they looked like in the many years where they were mature and popular.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#58

Post by fuzztester »

JohnFen wrote: post #12
estambar wrote: post #2

This webring isn't so much a ring as a wire, as one of the websites doesn't have the footer. This was always the problem with webrings in the first place - one broken link in the chain ruins it for everyone. Just like token ring based LANs

Yes, good webrings always needed an active ringmaster. I do think webrings are badly needed again, though, to serve the same purpose they were developed for in the first place: discoverability. It's become very difficult to find the good (according to my tastes) websites these days.

Same here. Very difficult.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#59

Post by fuzztester »

brnt wrote: post #7
gerikson wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just rebrand them as WebDAGs.

Last I checked, rings were usually cyclic.

And also commutative, if I remember my math right, so you can traverse them in both directions. Punning on the word ring (which is a math concept too, as in groups, rings and fields, and stretching the metaphor too, or is it a mixed metaphor? Heh.

Re: Bring Back Webrings

#60

Post by 6510 »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #47
6510 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could do that before the user is forwarded to the website. Remove them for a day, then 2, then 4, then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 etc it is not expensive to keep checking. Could send email too. You'd probably want to measure click though rate and do manual review. Could also have a redirecting page so that the back button allows the visitor to flag or report something.

But definitely only remove them for powers of two days, because... geek cred.

I use it for rss feeds, it really follows how likely it is for a feed to return. Checking every day was slowing things down.
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