Bring Back Webrings (opens in new tab)

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?

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.

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 just be a list of sites to check out the author put there. Maybe that's a bit more robust than a ring.

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

Webrings still exist. They're not mainstream. To the extent that the internet is "ruined," it's that the mainstream internet is ruined. There's no going back from this. The only option is to ignore much of the mainstream content on the internet. It will always be there, but critical ignoring is a required skill on the modern internet. The beauty is still there, it's just buried under mountains of trash, and your friends only know about those mountains of trash. (instagram, tiktok, youtube, etc.)

Everyone has made some good points about webrings and other methods of getting personal websites noticed.

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.

Related last week:

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

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.

I was thinking a webring like solution would allow discoverability while still owning your platform. Discoverability is a major concern I've heard from many bloggists.

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.

I was thinking about this less an hour ago

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.

Related. Others?

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 was old enough for a geocities homepage, but not old enough to get that a webring was a web-ring.

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! ;)

Sure.. with todays net, you'll end up with 100's of frameworks to implement the ring, probably based on the block-chain tech. Then don't forget the WRaaS, webrings as a service, paid subscription, NFTs, sponsored webrings followed by AI Web Rings. And maybe a bag of onion rings to go with it.

It is not a ring, but it can help you feel like it is: Someone shared this search site a while back: https://search.marginalia.nu/

It is a pretty great way to find smaller and more personal websites.

I don't mind it. But as others have already said, a single website can easily break a web ring. Why not a simple "I'm Feeling Lucky" button that takes you to a random website in the ring?

Just in case anyone is interested, I run the https://webri.ng platform. It's a platform that lets users create their own webrings without any coding required. This might come in handy if anyone here wanted to create a webring of their own. It actually hosts one of the webrings the author lists in their article.

Links could have the webring in the query string so that the pages can put a sticky navbar at the top of the viewport.(edit: could put #webring behind the link, give the navbar id="webring" then style it to stick to the top with #webring:target{})

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 >>>>>>>

I suspect that if there were a significant return to webrings we'd run into very similar problems. Shitty companies would pay to insert their garbage into popular webrings run by other people, and/or they'd start their own webrings and fill them with spam.

All nostalgia is a longing for youth.

ActivityPub potentially helps to solve this. With enough well-exposed/accessible connections to sites or posts you might be able to traverse around a network and collect similar items. There are a lot of other challenges there but it's a possibility.

Honestly what I really want is the return of DMOZ. A curated, categorized list of the best sites.

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.

My partner works in corporate communications and so we frequently lament the enshitification, specifically the way social media as a concept destroyed so many things and now is experiencing its own gotterdammerung. It feels like at the moment we are in a middle place, waiting for the next trend. Perhaps it will be a return to the super personalization of the 1990s, where everyone was making content of their own and expressing themselves online with their own flavors before the "platformization" came along. Post-Covid there appears to be a resurgence in community, in "authenticity" so logically it follows that our online engagement might follow a similar pattern.

I'm honestly starting to find the 'web nostalgia' a little nauseating, I kinda like gemini, but it lacking inline images and other 'modernities' like that take it a little too far back. The web overall will never go back to how it was in whichever era you idolise (for me it was 1992-1994), so it's probably best that we stop wishing it would.

Awesome! I couldn't agree more! Thank you.

The OG distributed index.

These sort of blog posts are becoming increasingly unsettling to me.