Bring Back Webrings(arne.me) |
Bring Back Webrings(arne.me) |
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?
Here's another idea: you put up links regularly to a webpage that dynamically sorts them by popularity, relevance, and date. Oh wait, that's Reddit.
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 work.
As automated search engines and social media feeds continue to drown in spam and engagement-porn, expect to see a resurgence of hand-curated web rings, directories, and marginalia-like scoped search engines, that variously highlight timely, historical, and evergreen content.
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.
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.
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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?
James Clavell obviously doesn't care about Shogun, why ... it hasn't changed for years!?!?!
Link aggregation sites serve a completely different purpose from webrings, and don't substitute for them. That's why for many years, link aggregation sites and webrings coexisted.
There's a lot of "momentum" to technologies. I'm personally convinced that webrings are one of those ideas that died for good reason. There's just easier ways to organize ourselves online.
I promise you: if you want a big list of links to follow, just start a Wiki. Or share them in your own Lemmy / Mastodon. Or open up your own Subreddit. Its going to be easier.
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If you want to rebuild the feeling of early community-driven internet, then you should be looking up IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org/), and not just trying to resurrect random technologies from 30 years ago.
When you have A, B, C, D, and E, all different webmasters on different parts of the internet making a webring of A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> A, things get really messed up when C stops responding to emails.
As others have said: you need a ringmaster for this to work. When C stops responding to emails, you tell B to update their page and point to D, for example.
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We have so many more technologies today than we did in the 90s. I don't know why anyone would look back at freaking Webrings when we have... I dunno... Wikis?
Now the Wiki administrator (A), could recruit B, C, D, and E to be moderators on the same Wiki. When C stops responding to emails, everything keeps going just fine.
Etc. etc.
I don't think anyone who actually lived in the 90s with directory services, Ask Jeeves, and Webrings would ever think about bringing those services back. Like, the good stuff were IRC, AIM, IRQ, USENET ?
Thinking more - what used to be common is a section called "other cool sites" or something similar, which would just be a list of sites to check out the author put there. Maybe that's a bit more robust than a ring.
Consider that LinkedIn has been trying to establish(/convert) itself in part as a blogging platform, and keeps trying to show you other users' blog posts, unsolicited. But not links to Twitter/X, Substack, Rumble, external blogs etc etc. Even though many LI users' blog-type posts are low-grade, it's near-impossible to get them successfully flagged as spam or self-promotional. Every time LI serve you a link to some other content on-site, and suppress serving you an outbound link (even if it was higher-quality), it presumably increases engagement on LI.
[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/how-do-you-avoid-recover-f...
Just like token ring based LANs
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.
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.
Let's see ...
I sprung from rung to rung
Skipping past the dung
On my wall let it be hung
That my feats remain unsung
Webrings should have a place - they were great for bringing similarly themed sites together and were a way of finding smaller, personal sites. The latter is probably more important nowadays than ever.
The webring revival isn't doing so well. I write the list at https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm and I recently visited evey link in every webring listed. For whatever reason, the ringmasters or the site owners, only 20% of them are fully navigable. For most, clicking the next link will eventually lead to a 404 page.
These new webrings have other problems, one of which is the member subject range is much wider than that of the orginal webrings so you never know what you'll be looking at next.
I list webrings that have at least a back and forward link, to help everyone they really should have both a member list page and a random link. That would go a little way to stop some of the dead ends.
Links here, Reddit, Facebook or whatever are not the answer. They are ephemeral while webrings were supposed to be more or less permanent, at least until they were removed from the ring.
Clique listings and directory pages aren't that great either. The rate of link rot is phenomenal. Even after just a couple of months the links on my own pages start breaking. Links on pages more than a couple of years old are barely worth clicking on.
Personally, I'd like to see webrings make a comeback, but unless they get a grip the new ones are going to wither away because they aren't navigable.
Ask HN: Why is there no effort to bring back webrings?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177128
And this thread with some 'rings and related threads listed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37577861
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.
You could have a footer that is some simple js that allows you to go to a sampling of related articles. Could track cross-domain referrals and give them a cut of generated ad revenue (not sure how you'd track that just yet).
To keep some of the riffraff out, you can charge a small fee to join the webring. Have the rings be able to manage their members to facilitate the removal of junk links.
Might make a nice small saas; though I'm not sure what the price point would be to make sense. Each ring priced as low as a $1/mo? $5/yr? Maybe a popular ring is worth $1000/mo.
If you link "content creators" they'll have no value to the reader.
Specifically I want my personal site to be a part of a “web 1.0” ring, where everyone uses technology that predates web 2.0 frameworks (Wordpress, AWS, CF etc…) and you generally roll your own everything.
If/when it grows too big, someone can add software for collaborative maintenance.
Starting point: https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/caezeo/web_10_era_w...
Stupid labels should die already, starting with "Gen [whatever]."
Why there is no effort to bring webrings back as search quality has declined? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177128 - Nov 2023 (12 comments)
Webring Technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37577861 - Sept 2023 (30 comments)
Ask HN: What Modern Alternatives for WebRings are there? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630750 - July 2023 (3 comments)
Webring History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34846719 - Feb 2023 (12 comments)
What ever happened to webrings? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585201 - Nov 2022 (111 comments)
Homebrew Computers Web-Ring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32033833 - July 2022 (11 comments)
HomeBrew Computers Web-Ring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29272595 - Nov 2021 (14 comments)
Mischa's Cursed Webring - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26358952 - March 2021 (92 comments)
Ask HN: Why are webrings not a thing anymore? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26242005 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
Show HN: I am trying to start a webring for geeks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549471 - June 2020 (89 comments)
Bringing Webrings Back from the 90s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19683896 - April 2019 (3 comments)
Ask HN: Anyone want to start a webring? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618082 - July 2018 (4 comments)
I thought it was some cool secretive club of people: “we bring you internet stuff, and we’re all friends. Maybe we’ll let you in, kid.”
Then I got a bit older and thought it was a lewd reference to circles of jerks.
It would be years later, after the blogosphere collapsed, and social media had given us all PTSD, when I first heard someone explain what it was.
Just a few minutes ago, actually! ;)
It is a pretty great way to find smaller and more personal websites.
you could link to:
webring.com?site=my-page.com&nav=next
then visitors end up at
yourpage.com?webring=my-page.com
or
yourpage.com#webring
If you want it to work without a domain you could also have many next and previous buttons.
<<<<<<<< webring >>>>>>>
However, while software can be made free and open-source, someone still has to pay for servers to run for any of this stuff to work. These things were easier back in the good ol' days when everyone just used university computer resources. Nowadays, university tuition has skyrocketed, while universities are no longer freely hosting internet resources like before, I guess because they need to pay their deans millions and build really fancy new dorms.
Except that nothing came up that replaced them.
> if you want a big list of links to follow, just start a Wiki.
What wasn't the purpose of webrings, though.
I have no special love for webrings as a mechanism. I do have a love for what they did socially, though. If something else came along that served the same purpose, that would be awesome -- but so far, nothing has. I think that the main reason for that is that the web itself has changed from a place for people to a place for commerce.
Today, kids are using Google Documents to communicate with each other in classrooms (ie: sharing links, collaborating on homework, etc. etc.), They don't need Webrings to share a set of links that happen to be on the same subject. In fact, you don't need any real tech at all, it could all just be a bulletin board, it could be a phone number that you leave somewhere with a computer hooked up that everyone connects with a 300 baud modem to. Etc. etc.
Or ya know, a Tweet, a Reddit post, a Facebook message. A google group. Etc. etc.
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.
Webrings require maintenance to be useful and worth using, just like search engines do. The better maintained and curated they are, the more useful they will be.
An example of this from the OP link. The page links to a11y-webring.club which has prev/next/random buttons that all produce this error:
This function has crashed
An unhandled error in the function code triggered the following message:
Runtime.UserCodeSyntaxError - SyntaxError: Unexpected token ':'
Like in your wiki example, if A falls, now you don't have A B C D E F... well, the whole alphabet is gone :)
Its far more likely for random individuals of a webring to disappear in my experience.
Ex: A could be the starting point of the webring. When C disappears, then D, E, and F are inaccessible. (A -> B -> Broken page).
A wiki is a single point of failure: you make A more reliable so that everyone has the information. A webring is an infinite number of single points of failure: a single failure (broken link / 404, etc. etc.) messes the entire ring up. Its horrible.
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 suggesting that we link all websites that exist in a unnamed class that includes the attributes of websites published prior to 2003 (as an example criteria based on when wordpress launched).
What would you name such a class other than Web 1.0 or old web or some such
Given how easy it is to run PostgreSQL and full text search these days, I think boutique search engines for small communities makes more sense than a webring.
"Other cool sites" lists were quite popular back then. That's what I used for site discovery instead of webrings.
As a way of discovering content, I love the idea.