You need a webring(shub.club) |
You need a webring(shub.club) |
"Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Isn't it better to provide a list of links so users can choose where they want to go "next"?
And why should I have to go around the whole "ring" to get back to where I started from? The Web is based on hyperlinks, not "hyper-rings".
Having it be a ring has the nice side effect that anyone closing a ring on your site (or adding your site to it) gets an idea of how everyone in the ring met.
It's more of a fuzzy social thing than a "let's represent social relationships in the most semantically accurate way possible" thing, and for people, I think that knowing how everyone met eachother is a nice thing. You can plan gettogethers off of that. It also keeps people socially accountable; if someone in the group turns out to be a dick, they can just be skipped in the webring.
I think initially the idea was mainly around the "ring" concept, but relatively quickly lots of different implementations did lots of different things, and we still called those "webrings" even though many weren't conceptually "rings" at all, more like "lists of websites that are kind of somewhat about the same thing, sometimes". There was typically a "Random" button/link too, and index, sometimes categories and more.
It can be a list of websites, with random order, the main point is people's websites linking to other people's websites, in some way, that it could eventually circle back somehow, then you have a webring.
It's a little silly if everyone is working off a centrally-maintained JSON file, you might as well turn it into a blogroll at that point.
But extremely fragile since if even one node in the network goes down the network is broken and if two go down then there will be sites no longer reachable from others. You want to know the other nodes in the network so you can deal with nodes that go down or leave the network.
I think there was some sense of creating something to explore, where you didn't get to choose where to go next, there was more serendipity involved due to someone else's curation. No, it doesn't really make sense from a usability or practicality perspective, which is why despite OP, you don't really see them any more.
The weird one is actually "rink" as in "skating rink" – because it derives from the word for "line".
So what you're talking about might actually be called a "web rink" if it existed, in that links flow in a linear fashion.
That depends! If your goal is some optimal way of navigating, sure. But the shape of a webring means your site has two "neighbours", which is fun and uses spatial notions we don't see often anymore. It also means someone can remember Site Y as "the one next from Site X", which is also fun and creates more ways sites relate to each other. This relating to one another is usually the point of a webring.
There is a modern-day similar thing. In MSN news-site the main news-article automatically steps though a loop. You can manually interfere, but the constraint is that you basically can see the news article only for a short time before it is replaced by another. I guess you could call it gamification as well. Thinks about Dunegeons and Dragons where you find news-articles in the dungeon and dragons are trying to burn them with their fiery blaze.
this was a popular one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ate_my_balls
Webrings kinda went away when "blogging" became the new thing, and then there were blogrolls and pingbacks and delicio.us and whathaveyou. That got supplanted by the larger glurge into social media with friendster, then myspaces top 8, and now everyone is just on facebook saying "what's the point?".
Indeed. As mentioned, its for personal sites as a lightweight way to share a link to a friends site that may or may not be related, rather than a list of affiliates or sponsors or whatever.
However I usually spent times in the links section of every website I visited.
Anyone else have a nerdy blog they want to ring me in? I'll point to the next one.
(engineersneedart.com)
The main idea being that you don't actually need to coordinate a real ring of links to easily link to posts on other blogs that you like.
Even before that, I just implemented a blogroll (or list of shared links, as I prefer to call it) at https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&link=1&view=sha... Maybe your blog is also in it!? I manually picked most of the bookmarks/feeds I follow from HN.
The basis of all these rolls, lists and rings are - of course - hyperlinks. RSS and OPML are silently working in the background. I think there's still unfulfilled potential for RSS as a replacement for social media, because the open web is already social media.
Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.
If the content is summarized and personalized for the user the search engine is already rendering similar pages.
Back in the days, how did it usually work about this : If your neighbour has only 7 visitor/day but you do have 100/day, can you ask to change and have this other 10000 visitor/day-site as neighbour?
As a webring admin, how do you manage these member requests?
A ring was thematic, friends, interest.
Does this still hold if n=0?
These days you could do this in client side JS, mayhe fetch the static list from a Gitgub blob or one of the sites in the group.
Interesting to see some misconceptions in this comments here, and the graphic at wikipedia showing it as an actual ring of links, but I don't believe that was ever a solid explanation.
Sure there was the option to add your website to most webrings, and some had checker settings to see if a recip link existed then plublish and share.. but that was short lived because spammers, and google's change of 'bad neighborhoods hurt you' - then corporate rollup / walls up..
However on many websites it was great to find similar sites and other sites the author had an interest in and wanted to share with friends / visitros.. recip link or not.
It was a useful tool for discovery and sharing. Google got so important so fast that people (and even at the software level (starting at you wordpress)) removed blogrolls entirely.
Now that it's understood that you can share with the nofollow attribute added to links, I think we will see more people adding blogrolls / webrings and that will naturally lead to more links back, and people appreciating sharing of other places of interest.
I started developing a new webrings plugin to make it easier for people to share and get submissions / suggestions, with options for checking for recip links, having a default nofollow link and such.
This led me to thinking about other uses for the same data / DB / fields.. and decidedly that the same backend parts can also create 'directory pages' - which are essentially what webrings were just as a footer scrolling widget verses full page per category.. so I added that.
Then I realized the same bits are basically waht is needed for creating a directory or associates.. could be other people who meet at a conference, could be people you work with, other companies you've done business with, or other professionals you've bumped into at other job sites / projects.. so I added that and it also is becoming a contact sharing / directory / roledex kind of system.
I did one blog post showing part of the functionality that is in the works: https://betterwebgroup.com/from-business-cards-to-digital-di...
Right now I'm working through the backend being difficult to chose what shows up on the front end and under what conditions.. hope to have sorted by end of month - when will hope people will help with testing and suggestions.
Trying to make it as standalone react system that can work into any website and a wordpress plugin at the same time has led to so challenges.. but it's getting close.
I feel like this is what keeps ruining things, in almost any hobby/sector/ecosystem I come across. Initially, as the only people interested in the thing is doing the thing because it's fun and interesting, everything works out great, people helping people because helping people is fun and the thing is fun.
After a while, somehow it starts to bring in money for some people, others start to see people earning money and then the money-optimizers eventually arrive, sucking all the fun out of the ecosystem since all they care about is money, money and money, and tons of more money-optimizers arrive after the initial batch made their success, and around we go until it's all commercial slop all over the place that drowns out all the authentic stuff that initially was almost everything in the community.
Seemingly non-profit groups with events held in actual venues where you can face-to-face show your disgust towards these people seem to be the only way of having communities that last for decades around a fun and interesting thing, anything online seems to fall victim to the above way too quickly.
It's a great deterrent against grifters and optimisers, since you can't sell your work and you can't set up a company to commercialise it, so anyone uninterested in the community or series has no incentive to get involved.
Sadly, it's really hard to achieve something similar in most fields, due to the incentive to turn everything into a side hustle.
In the early millennium, blogging was of course a niche interest, but one could still commonly meet people IRL who followed the same blogs; they were part of a real-life feeling of community. Blogs about local politics, religious denominations, or music-band fandom gained enough readers from those audiences to cause real-world consequences. When people are nostalgic about blogging, it’s also about blogging having been something that mattered societally.
It's nice to see some old ideas like this come back... also hoping to see more self-hosted conversational sites around topics of interest (bulletin boards) over the giant social media sites we have today.
I guess, but more collectively, so like "We both agree to share a list of websites we link to, and anyone who want to add their site to this list also agree to the same". It used to be popular in music, programming and web development blogs, that much I remember, but I can't say how popular it was at large, the web and the internet was pretty much mostly a geeky thing at the time (around 2000s).
1. It follows that all of human authorship is pointless since search engines now actively bury content and impede access to written documents. Long Live The New Flesh.
2. Webrings are obviously an artifact of people who hate AI slop and yearn for the simpler days of the older Web, before search engines were effective. Therefore the remark about generated summaries is powerfully sarcastic, as the twain shall never meet. Moreover, Google is no longer fit for purpose, so webrings are an apposite solution to the empty niche of trustworthy discovery mechanisms. Eat The Rich.
Which one the author actually meant depends entirely on their literacy regarding the web revival movement.
The most innovative ones were iframes of a single source of links (iframes were all the rage, unless of course you clicked "no frames" as a user, because your internet was so slow).
But even the less formal ones simply listed links to other sites, there was no visit order, and definitely was not directional/circular.
It's "ring" like a boxing ring - as in "those within the ring" not a directional loop like you mention.
> To be a part of the webring, each site has a common navigation bar; it contains links to the previous and next sites. By selecting next (or previous) repeatedly, the user will eventually reach the site they started at; this is the origin of the term "webring."
But, it was a fundamentally silly structure for the web, so many sites implemented something beyond the ring structure, which is what you're describing. Technically, those weren't webrings in the above sense.
> It's "ring" like a boxing ring
Nice retcon, but wrong.
(Sorry, I guess “serverless” is not a buzzword I’ll ever understand)