[HN Gopher] What ever happened to webrings? (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
What ever happened to webrings? (2015)
Author : susam
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-11-13 17:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hover.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (hover.blog)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Webrings were never meant to be in place of search. Search
| existed in 1994, in various crappy ways. I searched for things,
| and I occasionally click webrings links. Webring is more like an
| ad exchange for mostly non-profit personal sites.
| [deleted]
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Webrings died because they were made for personal homepages, and
| social media killed personal homepages.
| patorjk wrote:
| I remember joining these back in the day. They were actually
| pretty good at driving traffic to niche sites.
|
| I used one about 15 years ago to help promote an ASCII Art app I
| wrote (I'm still a member too). I just checked and the webring
| still exists (http://artcode.org/ascii/index.php). Many of the
| sites that were members are now gone, but some of them still
| exist. Kind of cool that it's still around, it's a nice look into
| the past.
| shagie wrote:
| Looking at it and the links...
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20150915200650/http://dir.webring... -
| oh, that looks neat... but then following to its current version,
| it appears to be bought by some other company and then left to
| rot (no content there).
|
| And then...
|
| > Or better yet, check out Hover's very own collection of random
| old websites, Retro Site Ninja!
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20150916233518/http://retrosite.n...
|
| That looks neat... curl: (6) Could not resolve
| host: retrosite.ninja
|
| Oh.
| rr888 wrote:
| I always thought Google PageRank would penalize you for a webring
| as its often from an unrelated site so could count as a spam
| link.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Where was that cool site I saw yesterday?
| Click...nope....click...nope....click...nope...click...that's it.
|
| Webrings were like the 8-track tape of the internet.
| stavros wrote:
| Google version: Where was that cool site I saw yesterday?
| Click... nope. Guess it's gone.
| treve wrote:
| indieweb has webrings: https://indieweb.org/indiewebring
| adventured wrote:
| What happened to them?
|
| Webrings were a form of social network and modern centralized
| social networks with media capabilities ate them.
|
| MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Digg, Reddit
| and all the rest - they depopulated webrings, which drastically
| reduced the value in the network rings.
|
| People have N time in the day to post content. They chose the
| easier, heavily networked publishing systems to use.
| dang wrote:
| We changed the url from
| http://web.archive.org/web/20150920010813/http://www.hover.c...
| to the current version of the original source.
|
| Please don't post archive.org links unless there's really no
| alternative.
|
| " _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on
| something found on another site, submit the latter._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| advisedwang wrote:
| This article seems mostly focused on the business webrings, but
| what about the core idea?
|
| I think it was probably doomed by sites not wanting outbound
| links, either because of pagerank, fear of loosing traffic,
| looking unprofessional, or the appearance of an affiliation. The
| inbound traffic was not worth the outbound traffic.
| cragfar wrote:
| I could be remembering it wrong, but I'm pretty sure Google's
| webscraper was far superior to basically any other search
| engines, and that along with it's ranking algorithm killed
| whatever need for webrings there were. I remember having to
| tell Yahoo about my website and they said their bot would look
| at it in a couple of days.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| I operated a webring for my university, eventually breaking it
| into separate rings for students, alumni, and fans of the
| sports programs. The biggest issue was people who would sign up
| but never would insert the required code into their page for
| the navigation to appear. In most cases, it didn't seem like
| they were trying to be freeloaders getting inbound traffic
| while prohibiting outbound but rather that writing HTML was
| still relatively new and many people were following along with
| tutorials, making simple substitutions for colors and adding
| individual links but got confused when they needed to add a big
| block of html table code. A few were semi-freeloading in that
| they insisted the inbound link be to their index.html but the
| ring code that enabled outbound links were hidden at the bottom
| of another page.
|
| There were various scripts created for managing such issues but
| it didn't seem worth the hassle so I ended up letting the rings
| decay until eventually pulling the plug when leaving for grad
| school.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| I didn't even know webring.org but used quite a lot own build
| webrings until the mid 2000s. Probably something like this has a
| chance again as google does not work anymore to find multiple
| niche sites.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I read;
|
| > If the words GeoCities, Excite or Alta Vista mean anything to
| you, then chances are that the word 'webring' triggers a sudden
| pang of nostalgia.
|
| but cannot help but hear a voice from 2032, saying;
| "If the words Like, Follow, and Tweet mean anything to you, then
| chances are that the words "Social Media" triggers a sudden pang
| of nostalgia."
|
| If nostalgia is a permanent feature of the Internet, so is the
| insufferable parochialism of the present.
| aaron695 wrote:
| a-dub wrote:
| was just recently wondering what happened to blogrolls...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| The decline of an idea should not be blamed on a single service.
| Why did no one else make some better service for webrings?
| miohtama wrote:
| Because search engines (Google) and centralised blogging
| services (WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, later Twitter, Facebook,
| etc.) offer better user experience and discoverability than
| webrings.
| stavros wrote:
| I really like webrings, I wonder why they aren't as popular any
| more. I wonder if I should create something that lets you make
| your own webrings, just define a list of sites, add the link, and
| that's it.
| 1337shadow wrote:
| Usually those are paid for by webmasters, such as with
| linkfarm.net
| stavros wrote:
| Hm, but that's not a webring, is it? A webring links from one
| site to the next, but linkfarm (as I understand it) links
| from multiple sites to one.
| hoherd wrote:
| I think Awesome lists kind of fit this bill. I know it's not
| the same UX as a webring, but it seems like having an index
| view would suffice. It's more utilitarian and less
| experiential, but would be much easier to manage and track.
|
| Did webrings have more features than just the list of sites,
| like voting and stuff? I honestly don't remember.
| c7b wrote:
| > A webring was prided on offering a free and decentralized
| experience.
|
| Sounds great, and I imagine they were useful for the 90's web to
| jump from one Star Wars fansite to the next (which would have
| been much harder to find otherwise), but frankly, I didn't feel a
| great desire to see them now. I guess that mode of browsing is
| simply not how I use the web nowadays, nor I imagine many other
| people.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Maybe this is the direction we need to go in, however. Most
| people now do not type in URL's and a search engine becomes
| their single point of knowledge or discovery (or social media).
| Do we really want that much power in a single entity?
|
| What we might need are modern web rings - an easy to setup
| software that is plug in play for anyone who sets up a simple
| site - and that then can be configured to point to other sites.
| Maybe with a universal login for that "ring"
| c7b wrote:
| I agree, I also often think that the web should become more
| decentralized again, but the thing is, it also needs to be
| fun to use. Mastodon is an interesting experiment in that
| regard.
|
| Maybe one could argue that link aggregators like HN are sort
| of a spiritual successor to the webring concept? You also go
| from one interesting site to the next, but you also have a
| social aspect, which makes it a lot more fun. The
| centralization is still quite strong, though. Just wondering
| whether you could keep the social element but make it more of
| a 'pull' thing, like webrings were, than a 'push' from a
| central site like HN.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-14 23:00 UTC)