Webrings were ok, but what I really miss was people just having a page of links to other websites they liked. This was the feature that drove most of my web browsing.
Today the web doesn't feel like a web, it feels like there's a few large social media hubs that point to every other website, and those sites only point one of two places: to themselves or to an Amazon affiliate link. Years ago I remember getting frustrated on some news site because all their hyperlinks just linked to other barely-relevant articles on their website. I didn't understand at the time what they were doing.
If you have a personal website, consider adding a page with links to your favorite sites. Search engines just don't capture that type of browsing.
I don't advocate for their content but the way they've built things is pretty great.
I've described it as "the 1998 web with better cgi scripts".
Also search engines like marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu) and teclis (https://teclis.com/) are nice - they essentially filter out pages with advertisements and trackers which is a pretty brilliant way to defeat SEO farms and other low quality content with ulterior motives.
To see their effectiveness give it a challenge. Try queries like "how to lose weight" or heck, "lasagna recipe".
To demonstrate, I just took the time to make two videos for "lasagna recipe" with the network tab of chrome's inspector window open:
Along with recipe sites, there's recently been a crop of similar looking tech help sites that basically give w3schools level answers with a bunch of rotating ads based on the hypothesis that users will look at the content, then focus on their work for the next hour or two, keeping the tab open because that's just the common pattern while the ad rotations go on the page.
As far as serving ads go, programming and recipe sites exhibit similar usage patterns. Similar to recipe sites, the answers you came for are interleaved with ads in the hope that people drag their cursor over the banner ad while selecting text from the site or at least keep that part in the viewport open for the duration of the activity. What a lovely feature!
Search has to be driven by axioms of values and purpose because different intents yield different results. There is no silver bullet.
For example, google, bing and yandex's goals are pretty antithetical to mine unless I'm actively trying to buy something. On google, I came for a lasagna recipe and someone tried to sell me car parts and a home mortgage which is fine. Those engines are just a poorly chosen tool for that job.
>Tor sites do all of this still.
I like browing onion sites from time to time, typically personal sites. It is resemblant of the wild west days of the web, except most onion sites are for drugs.
There's a new flood of people who don't mind mixing violence with their politics, hate groups, and a few fascinating libraries that are vast archives of incendiary frauds, quacks and malicious propagandists of the past.
Many countries free speech rules are more restrictive than the United States when it comes to hate speech and calls for violence and insurrection.
I've been meaning to scrape those archives and email academic historians with a Dropbox link. Historical hateful screeds and conspiratorial fabrications are actually hard to come by (think of say, political opportunists trying to capitalize on the 1932 Bonus March with self serving conspiracies).
It's a long list of mostly self-published pamphlets, newsletters and books. When these mountebanks pass on since they were never actually affiliated with legitimate institutions, their papers don't get cared for.
This also goes back to the search problem. GBY explicitly excludes the most virulent and harmful of this material. Fine. Agreed. Totally legitimate. But there's no way to say "I'm interested in folklore and sociology, I know it's all fiction".
People take action, sometimes murderous, based on these fraudsters. For the purpose of crafting policy, laws, and documenting manipulation techniques for media literacy, there should be a quarantined place where their lies go instead of being intentionally scrubbed after it manifests some awful tragedy. Maybe that would be a good candidate for a separate search tool.
There's some decent ML work with NLP there since (1) many things are anti-semitic dog-whistles (such as Alex Jones using the term Globalist) and would probably cluster really nicely with the quiet part using seq2seq, word2vec and might even be achievable unsupervised, and (2) many of them are just crude copy/paste amalgamations from older hate sheets, like the protocols, secret world government by spiridovich or waters flowing eastward by fry; oftentimes with merely the names and events updated to be more contemporary while usually throwing a different oppressed group under the bus such as immigrants or trans people. In the results you could display this: "See side by side comparison with this literature from the British Union of Fascists" where you clearly demonstrate some "truth about gays" is just a crude find and replace of say "truth about jews" from 1935.
It might also be helpful to assuage the victims who are falling into these libelous traps by clearly demonstrating how obvious the fakery is. Of course some seem to lack the cognitive wherewithal regardless of the clarity of the evidence but we might as well give it a go.
People started to think about linking as a way of "losing" Pagerank.
Stuffing keywords.
And the worst of all, content length. People started writing long articles to keep the Search God happy, most of the times with little added value and a diluted information density, making readers lose time to keep the Gods happy.
Then social networks took over and it was even worse. Most people ditched their own sites or never started one, a friend who is a photographer lost his FB/Instagram accounts a couple of days ago and now understands what I was talking about when I told him he should have some content in a domain he controls.
I do this! I've categorized them, and for many of them I even describe them! http://matecha.net/links/ (also note the http, to allow older systems to connect. https also supported of course)
Thank you! I got interested in using scuttlebutt, I would like to get involved in a social network not used by many; was sad to see that it isn't maintained anymore, so probably not safe.
Isn't this called a blogroll, this list of links? In my company's website software, we built a module that combines webrings with blogrolls. We just call it 'shared links'. It's plain simple, because it's the most stupid basic thing one can do with the web: have links to other interesting content. And it's also a curated list of links. Real human recommendations.
I really like these lists, especially this long. Since I saw something interesting in the first couple of links/descriptions, I bookmarked it and will go through it soon. For me, this is what the internet was meant for. I'm also collecting interesting links to share publicly on my website(s), in a sort of webring/blogroll kinda way.
As a co-founder of Starseed, owner of WebRing after Sage Weil, I wish I had more time to chime in on all of this. I will say the OP gets this wrong:
> Webring.org was purchased by an investment firm in 1997
We were not an investment firm - We were a scrappy startup that was housed in the same city as Sage and got to know him (as well as many other techies in the community) and had the opportunity to purchase WebRing from him at a time when he was ready pursue other interests.
Webring.com gets it more correct:
> In 1997, Weil sold WebRing to Starseed, Inc.
WebRing was awesome for its time - I personally did a lot to speed up the system that we purchased from Sage to help it keep scaling to the point where we could get acquired.
Tim Killeen, eventual owner of WebRing after Yahoo left it to die, did some great additions to the technology to help keep it relevant for several more years.
There's been a lot of discussions of small personal sites coming back into vogue recently - This gives me hope that something like WebRing could find value in the community again.
/side note:
I was onsite at GeoCities working to integrate WebRing into their system.
Literally, on my final day onsite and the when were to demo the integration, the company all-hands announcing the sale to Yahoo happened.
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.
> If nostalgia is a permanent feature of the Internet, so is the insufferable parochialism of the present.
I feel confident you could have used a more accurate word that doesn't make it sound like you're trying to flex your vocabulary. HN in a nutshell I suppose.
Back in the late nineties there was a Swedish web company called speedway-da.se or something like that (digital army) that linked to a site they made for their friends that grouped their personal blogs.
It was something short like bla404.something can't remember so I can't search archive for it either... but since speedway isn't there I think this was before archive existed.
Anyhow the point is; those "blogs" or home made diaries where incredible, pseudonymous before people realized that what you say on the internet can be stored forever so people really REALLY said the truth and I couldn't stop reading.
About relationships, funny tidbits and absurdities of life all mixed in the most honest and open communication I have ever witnessed, all made from scratch (html and pictures only at that time no .css an very little to no .js) AND designed from scratch AND self hosted!
To go back there you need some sort of cryptographic solution that ensures you can hide forever but even then the sort of information you are prepared to share now is not the same as back then when nobody knew/understood what privacy problems an indefinitely copyable/storable/shareable world brings.
> Anyhow the point is; those "blogs" or home made diaries where incredible, pseudonymous before people realized that what you say on the internet can be stored forever so people really REALLY said the truth and I couldn't stop reading.
Odd but I felt like people were more aware during that era that what you said might never go away, but were perhaps emboldened by the default pseudonymous state of the web at the time. I remember being taught in school to use no personal information when setting up accounts and my classmates largely following that doctrine. Facebook's real name policy seemed bizarre to me but the world had kind of changed by then.
I think the problem is we need to move into the low power digital realm to survive, because all physical low hanging fruits have been picked.
So that means the real value has to move into the digital world which is fragile = the hardware breaks and since it's connected you can get hacked without recourse!
Back then digital was just for fun, now it's serious. I don't know where you grew up and which level of paranoia the people around you had?
That said, you should probably be more scared about the future, than the past; only one way around it: Take responsability and prepare:
- Own your connection.
- Own your hardware.
- Own your software.
- Own your time.
And here "own" is more "know", "be able to repair" and "have the right to use", than "be rich in money"; although without money you can't do anything.
But a simple Raspberry 4 on battery backup (on the fiber router too) with dynamic DNS; can actually feed you, maybe not today but very soon when AWS and co. start raising prices! It's not a question of if, but when.
Nice article about webrings, which I had forgotten about.
Thank you. One quibble: “Websites were difficult to build” — I have to disagree. Websites were far far easier to build then.
You only needed to learn some HTML. There was no CSS, no JS, server-side rendering was non-existent or limited to some very specific features provided by your host (visitor counters were popular, maybe even a guestbook where visitors could leave a message if you wanted to get fancy!).
> You only needed to learn some HTML. There was no CSS, no JS…
The page linked in response is mostly CSS, and (I just went to a laptops to check) the first few lines are javascript google tags.
I think the original point was supposed to be that websites used to be just content wrapped in some simple HTML, which was easy to learn. But now the level of complexity is higher and so is the barrier to entry. I agree with this point.
So when someone replied saying “what’s stopping you from [building simple HTML sites] in 2022, thats what I did”, I was confused to see a site that included JS and was mostly CSS. Because it was seemingly trying to contradict a point about no CSS and JS. Honestly it feels like spam.
Its tangental, but I agree the source seems hand written and seems to have a well done minimalist approach, which is respectable. I regret the negative tone to my original response.
Yeah, I remember ~2000 or so it seemed like a lot of non-techie people were creating their own personal site on Geocities/Angelfire/etc. In high schools lots of teenagers (again, including non-techie folk) had their own web pages.
What was nice is that more thought went into it, since it was basically a blank canvas. There also was a focus on quality over quantity - your website was something you continually grew and improved. Modern content is something you churn out and forget about immediately after.
But as easier options became available, those sites disappeared. First blogs came along, which were more structured. And modern social media is even more structured as well. We went from a single blank canvas you could spend hours tinkering with to a coloring book page you're given for sixty seconds before it gets thrown away and you're given the next one.
Eh, i guess if you had a basic level of ability and knowledge of not just HTML, but also the ability to upload files over FTP, register a domain, set up the DNS records to point your domain to your host.
but most of the people building wix or squarespace (or whatever all the youtuber and podcasters are promoting this week), they don't have that knowledge and don't necessarily want to learn it. easier for you doesn't mean easier for everybody.
Geocities and the like had ways to put up a website without much expertise by the late 1990s.
Many ISPs included personal web hosting with their internet access service at the time as well, which usually did require a slightly higher level of knowledge, but not that high. Netscape had a point and click page editor by 1997.
In some ways they're even easier to build than they were back then if you use the right tools. Some static website generators these days are ridiculously simple to get started with and can get you rolling pretty darn fast with a quite professional looking and easy to self-host web site (or VPS host, or other site hosting method). The hard part of it all is writing content folks will want to read. Best if folks do what they did back then and write content about things you're passionate about. If it excites you to write about it, that excitement will often be "contagious" to others of similar mindset and interests.
If anything, the tools that were built to deal with problems extant at the time only allowed the building of more complicated websites - or, all too often, not more complicated websites but built in more complicated ways.
The heap of spaghetti these apps would pump out to create a webpage is similar to the endless layers of divs I see when I look at React generated source. Plus ça change.
> 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.
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"
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.
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.
This. Webrings today would help to find only other sites relevant to the 1st one, something that sponsored results in search engines returned pages made harder with time. Not only they can coexist with search engines, they would actually improve them, although not in the way Google et al. would like.
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.
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.
For those dearly departed websites, a fine extension exists to easily pass a 404 URL to archive.org, painlessly loading the backed up site in 2 clicks of a mouse...
Available for Chrome Edge Firefox and Safari
https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
I believe webrings could still be great discoverability and serendipity tools for smaller communities today. They could provide a curative answer to the failure of qualitative selection in search engines and a (small but significant) counterbalance to the corporate attention-sinks that dominate the modern web.
Of course this depends on trustworthy people who are willing to take on the effort to become a “ringmaster” of their community and approve new entries. There could even be webrings that connect great related webrings, forming a decentralized network of rings – a web of value and meaning rather than commerce and data aggregation.
But I guess our browsing habits have changed too much and it has become rare that we discover great websites outside of the realm of anonymous content-machines. Most people wouldn’t even see any of those rings or would ignore them and instead google for similar websites, even if they find only a bunch of crap between ads.
Yes. And, SixDegrees, Delicio.us Digg, early Reddit where folk would just post links they thought interesting to their own profile (who uses reddit that way now? Can one, even?); folksonomies and social book-marking.
Maybe there's a swing back in that direction with the "fediverse"?
I’m really surprised by the love of web rings shown here. Even in the late 90s they felt cheesy, and by the early 2000s seemed like most of them were prey to scams. There must have been some sort of typo-squatting thing going on because I recall clicking some web ring links and then suddenly you’d get to a site that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. In fact, the way I remember it, usually after 1 to 2 links in the ring, you were off in left field at something completely unrelated. Maybe I was just unlucky? I do remember getting spammed with requests to add my site to many web rings, all of which seemed very poorly run. Maybe it had something to do with the particular topics I had on my site? I don’t really know.
Ah! I was part of them - the Webrings. One of the most key/vivid memory was being on Macromedia's site of the day, and a whole swarm of links coming in. Then many other "CSS Site of the Day" followed. The night I got the email of being accepted into 9Rules[1] was one of those celebratory events.
Not on my personal website, but I did started some sorta linking/collecting/diary-ing thingy at our family website https://notes.oinam.com (very rough around the edges, lots of broken links, yet to even have a pattern to start tidying up).
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.
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.
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.
I have openring on my blog and am very happy with it. Each of my posts now has a few links at the bottom to recent posts on blogs I follow. https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring/
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.
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.
After further thought, Awesome lists miss one critical thing: there's no way to navigate from the pages in the list back to the index or to other pages in the list. That's a pretty crucial feature of webrings.
> "...when finding things online was a treasure hunt rather than a simple search query."
I remember my first moments on the web, 1995 or 1996. There was a website, it might have even been disinfo.org, and it had really weird shenanigans like forums for people who (believe they) had been kidnapped by UFOs. I thought it was great! But the second time I logged in, I couldn't find it. So I wrote a nice email to Yahoo asking if they had removed it from their listings, and somebody at Yahoo responded almost immediately with the URL, like this was a normal thing to do. I think about that sometimes, when thinking about the early days of the web.
Because search engines (Google) and centralised blogging services (WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, later Twitter, Facebook, etc.) offer better user experience and discoverability than webrings.
I dunno. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. don't actually provide what the web used to provide, so they certainly didn't improve anything from the early web. It's apples-and-oranges, but the apples mostly don't exist anymore. It happened as part of the shift the web made from being people-driven to being commerce-driven.
Yes, exactly! I remember it being something junky that people added to their site because they were desperate for traffic. I don’t recall ever seeing a web ring with anything interesting or useful in it beyond the page I started on because I knew that site had something I’d like on it before opening my browser.
I unknowingly proposed something similar recently — an alliance of Mac indie developers forming an alliance to link to each other's web sites — and everyone said "Isn't that a webring?"
they were also not meant to scale. if something happens to the Ringmaster, that was it. I remember a couple rings falling apart years ago because of that.
Today the web doesn't feel like a web, it feels like there's a few large social media hubs that point to every other website, and those sites only point one of two places: to themselves or to an Amazon affiliate link. Years ago I remember getting frustrated on some news site because all their hyperlinks just linked to other barely-relevant articles on their website. I didn't understand at the time what they were doing.
If you have a personal website, consider adding a page with links to your favorite sites. Search engines just don't capture that type of browsing.