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I was just thinking about these the other day. The other thing that died off was "web rings". From back in the days when search engines were rubbish, so you'd h
by robert_tweed 10y ago
I was just thinking about these the other day. The other thing that died off was "web rings". From back in the days when search engines were rubbish, so you'd have to find one site that was approximately what you were after, then click lots of links until eventually, at about 4 or 5 degrees of separation from the original search, you might find what you were originally looking for. I know, it seems barbaric now.
Reciprocal links between similar sites were much more important in those days. In fact, the web was generally a friendlier, less commercialised and siloed place, because cooperation between webmasters was the only way anyone would ever find your content.
What I find sad is that now Google is becoming more commercial and heavily gamed through SEO, the first page of results is increasingly likely to be full of links to buy a thing than information about that thing. And because there is much looser interlinking between sites now, it's a lot harder to find information any other way.
- martin-adams 10y agoI also think a shift is that the web is very content driven now, so rather than linking sites together, you link content together.
- robert_tweed 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/741/ https://xkcd.com/741/
- csydas 10y agoWell, it's not only that. A lot of the web has shifted away from open parsable information to video and paid support content. You can't really quickly parse a video to know if you actually have content you need or if you've just loaded an advertisement for someone's video series. On top of that, SEO generated pages that just copy content from forums that have popular search terms have polluted a lot of searches and it's really hard to even know what to look for anymore if the product you want information on doesn't have its own support forum. Locking contant to PDFs, to videos, to image slideshows, the information just isn't easily parsable by the search engines, but they show up in keyword searches, and easily dupe users into clicking through. Ads may have had a purpose to help content creators for awhile, but they have changed the landscape of the web for the worse overall. There are very few ad-driven enterprises/businesses that have an adequate content:advertisement ratio. Some youtube channels do it well - most do it very poorly. News articles have changed for the worse overall, with the actual articles weaving like a snake between advertisements, or people attaching auto-play advertisements to the bottom of articles, and so on. It's obnoxious, it affects the user's ability to actually access and interact with the content, and it results in a far less educated public.
- detaro 10y agoFor a while blogs still linked to recommended blogs ("blogroll"), now it seems to be mostly the occasional blog post recommending other blogs. Thematic hobby sites seem to be basically the only ones to have kept link lists to related sites.