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Indeed, webrings and 'blogrolls' were awesome - a great way to share the web. Then google came in and started penalizing web sites for outbound links. Then e

Indeed, webrings and 'blogrolls' were awesome - a great way to share the web. Then google came in and started penalizing web sites for outbound links. Then everyone stopped the blogrolls and the webrings disappeared - and people even got stingy with linking to a site in a blog post. Sure, blame 'shady seo' or what have you - and yeah that became a thing, but the real blame is google. Pushing sites down google was such a scary thing that wordpress took the previously-in-core linkroll out in future updates - even if you have a blogroll with just friends - it was removed - many did not know - and if you did, you had to go install a plugin to bring the functionality back. Of course the better options would of been to just auto-nofollow tag all the blogroll links - share the web and not to worry about a google penalty or being associated with 'spooky sounds "bad nieghborhood" in google's alog-eyes' I'd love to see web rings brought back with auto-nofollow added - and a stats system that was open to all who installed / used it for webring X Y or Z - and blogrolls that are easy to nofollow.. better with hover preview / a note about why you love site Y or what have you. It would be better for the web, but it's not easy to do currently and not a big benefit for the work right now. Anyone remember when the search engines had a web ring to try the search at other engines at the bottom?

unraveller 5y ago
Web Mentions are kind of a replacement for webrings. The problem with web mentions is that it takes one or two manual steps and might as well be link-only comments. Google are practically unqualified to separate genuine content from spam. What's their reason to serve users who can be endlessly contented with externally recommended content? That's effectively ad-blocking at the mental level to them. If we could invent some ubiquitous on-page discovery mechanism we'd have big tech over a barrel.

unraveller 5y ago

Web Mentions are kind of a replacement for webrings. The problem with web mentions is that it takes one or two manual steps and might as well be link-only comments. Google are practically unqualified to separate genuine content from spam. What's their reason to serve users who can be endlessly contented with externally recommended content? That's effectively ad-blocking at the mental level to them. If we could invent some ubiquitous on-page discovery mechanism we'd have big tech over a barrel.