11 ms·

What ever happened to webrings? (2015)

129 points by susam 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago
Modula-2 webrings still exists, http://www.modulaware.com/m2wr/ http://www.modulaware.com/m2wr/
ReactiveJelly 4y ago
> The technology for webrings was owned and managed by webring.org > A webring offered a free and decentralized experience Which is it lol? Decentralized or owned and managed by a single domain?
advisedwang 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Because search engines (Google) and centralised blogging services (WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, later Twitter, Facebook, etc.) offer better user experience and discoverability than webrings.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    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.
  - coldacid 4y ago
    s/offer better user experience and discoverability/have better marketing and SEO/ FTFY.
PhasmaFelis 4y ago
Webrings died because they were made for personal homepages, and social media killed personal homepages.
shagie 4y ago
Looking at it and the links... http://web.archive.org/web/20150915200650/http://dir.webring.org/ 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.ninja/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150916233518/http://retrosite.n... That looks neat... curl: (6) Could not resolve host: retrosite.ninja Oh.
genghisjahn 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Google version: Where was that cool site I saw yesterday? Click... nope. Guess it's gone.
- jagged-chisel 4y ago
  Except 8-tracks didn’t have bookmarks
stavros 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Usually those are paid for by webmasters, such as with linkfarm.net
  - stavros 4y ago
    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.
    - 1337shadow 4y ago
      No https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
- hoherd 4y ago
  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.
  - hoherd 4y ago
    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.
patorjk 4y ago
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 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.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Devault uses one on his blog pages.[0] Actually, he wrote it himself to support static websites.[1] Naturally. [0] https://drewdevault.com https://drewdevault.com [1] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
treve 4y ago
indieweb has webrings: https://indieweb.org/indiewebring https://indieweb.org/indiewebring
dang 4y ago
We changed the url from http://web.archive.org/web/20150920010813/http://www.hover.com/blog/what-ever-happened-to-webrings/ 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
c7b 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
  - 8note 4y ago
    Reddit already has this -- make yourself a subreddit and post links you like to it
rr888 4y ago
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.
- worldofmatthew 4y ago
  Use nofollow?
adventured 4y ago
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.
aaron695 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
a-dub 4y ago
was just recently wondering what happened to blogrolls...
nonrandomstring 4y ago
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 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 paroch...{EDIT} ear-shredding squee of fanbois.
- the_doctah 4y ago
  > 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.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > a more accurate word How do you know the OP’s thoughts to believe you have a more accurate word to convey them? Parochial perfectly conveys the combination of ignorance, narrow perspective and pettiness. What would you use with the same meaning?
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Do you want to have a go at re-wording it? I'm assuming "parochialism" is what you have an issue with, but I'm struggling to think of what else sounds better and conveys the same meaning. https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/parochial https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/parochial <--- those are all pretty crap
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  You know you're getting older when people start getting nostalgic for things you still think of as new.
- sumnole 4y ago
  If you miss GeoCities, you can get your modern fix through NeoCities: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
quickthrower2 4y ago
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.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  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.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    See also: Blog Rolls (which I think are better).
Jyaif 4y ago
Just the other day I was talking about webrings and how some discord servers are emulating this by having "partnered communities".
hammock 4y ago
Ok for those a little younger who don’t remember webrings- remember stumbleupon?
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  I found so much cool stuff on StumbleUpon.
- ehecatl42 4y ago
  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"?
rendall 4y ago
> "...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.
buzzert 4y ago
They still exist, and are really fun! I'm part of a community that has a webring and a Mastodon instance: https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/
avidphantasm 4y ago
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.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Indeed. If it wasn’t impossible, it was probably easy. Because there was just so little to it back then. The good news is that it’s just as easy today to make those simple websites.
- brigandish 4y ago
  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.
  - jxf 4y ago
    See: Microsoft Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc.
    - brigandish 4y ago
      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.
- gog 4y ago
  They are still easy to build if you want to build the same site you would be building back then.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    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.
anjel 4y ago
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 https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
aimor 4y ago
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.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  So much awesome stuff was lost from those days, and was never replaced.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Don't be a doomer. We have the technology.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      It's not really an issue of technology.
- amatecha 4y ago
  I do this! I've categorized them, and for many of them I even describe them! http://matecha.net/links/ http://matecha.net/links/ (also note the http, to allow older systems to connect. https also supported of course)
  - creamynebula 4y ago
    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.
samstave 4y ago
They were afraid, and things got hot, what we normally call in the industry; BBQ Chicken Webrings.
amatecha 4y ago
There are a few active webrings I'm aware of, and their participants are pretty active and use them as a way to explore a slice of the web https://fediring.net/ https://fediring.net/ https://ring.fediverse.radio/ https://ring.fediverse.radio/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ Further, one acquaintance has built a search engine specifically for web rings: https://github.com/cblgh/lieu https://github.com/cblgh/lieu
jrnichols 4y ago
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.
thomond 4y ago
There's something seedy about the term webring I just can't identify.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  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.
casualwriter 4y ago
Webring was great. Missing it like missing old good day which everything is fresh and good. Now have to dig in junk for good thing, rarely fresh.
phforms 4y ago
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.
lapcat 4y ago
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?"
davidpfarrell 4y ago
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. Exciting times !
- gsempe 4y ago
  Who is owning the WebRing brand now? I would be happy to discuss ways to bring it back in the modern web!
  - davidpfarrell 4y ago
    All of the servers (co-located: so old school amiright!?) are gone and domain names have been relinquished. I'm honestly not sure why the current webring.com has a history section on it since the site doesn't appear to anything else useful. Just occurred to me that, if you were designing this today, you wouldn't choose "webring.com" ... It would be Ringz.io, or wbr.ng or Loop.ly or somesuch :)
wozname 4y ago
My Dad runs a website for his Meccano hobby, and as far as I know their webring is still active: http://nzfmm.co.nz/ http://nzfmm.co.nz/ https://meccano.link/ https://meccano.link/ I was definitely surprised to see an active web ring.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
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 https://notes.oinam.com (very rough around the edges, lots of broken links, yet to even have a pattern to start tidying up). 1. https://9rules.com https://9rules.com
sinenomine 4y ago
Webrings are very much alive, see for yourself: https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://fediring.net https://fediring.net https://getimiskon.neocities.org/gr/lainring.html https://getimiskon.neocities.org/gr/lainring.html
thewebcount 4y ago
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.
- jerglingu 4y ago
  "join my webring" was something of a meme before memes were a thing
jefftk 4y ago
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/ https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring/
bullen 4y ago
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. It's lost in time, like tears in rain.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  > 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.
  - bullen 4y ago
    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.
deafpolygon 4y ago
Then social media came along and put the final nail in its coffin.

129 points by susam 4y ago

Modula-2 webrings still exists, http://www.modulaware.com/m2wr/ http://www.modulaware.com/m2wr/

> The technology for webrings was owned and managed by webring.org > A webring offered a free and decentralized experience Which is it lol? Decentralized or owned and managed by a single domain?

advisedwang 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago

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.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

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 4y ago
Because search engines (Google) and centralised blogging services (WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, later Twitter, Facebook, etc.) offer better user experience and discoverability than webrings.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  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.
- coldacid 4y ago
  s/offer better user experience and discoverability/have better marketing and SEO/ FTFY.

PhasmaFelis 4y ago

Webrings died because they were made for personal homepages, and social media killed personal homepages.

shagie 4y ago

Looking at it and the links... http://web.archive.org/web/20150915200650/http://dir.webring.org/ 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.ninja/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150916233518/http://retrosite.n... That looks neat... curl: (6) Could not resolve host: retrosite.ninja Oh.

genghisjahn 4y ago

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 4y ago
Google version: Where was that cool site I saw yesterday? Click... nope. Guess it's gone.
jagged-chisel 4y ago
Except 8-tracks didn’t have bookmarks

stavros 4y ago

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 4y ago
Usually those are paid for by webmasters, such as with linkfarm.net
- stavros 4y ago
  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.
  - 1337shadow 4y ago
    No https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
hoherd 4y ago
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.
- hoherd 4y ago
  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.

patorjk 4y ago

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 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.

wrycoder 4y ago
Devault uses one on his blog pages.[0] Actually, he wrote it himself to support static websites.[1] Naturally. [0] https://drewdevault.com https://drewdevault.com [1] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring

treve 4y ago

indieweb has webrings: https://indieweb.org/indiewebring https://indieweb.org/indiewebring

dang 4y ago

We changed the url from http://web.archive.org/web/20150920010813/http://www.hover.com/blog/what-ever-happened-to-webrings/ 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

c7b 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
- 8note 4y ago
  Reddit already has this -- make yourself a subreddit and post links you like to it

rr888 4y ago

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.

worldofmatthew 4y ago
Use nofollow?

adventured 4y ago

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.

aaron695 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

a-dub 4y ago

was just recently wondering what happened to blogrolls...

nonrandomstring 4y ago

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 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 paroch...{EDIT} ear-shredding squee of fanbois.

the_doctah 4y ago
> 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.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > a more accurate word How do you know the OP’s thoughts to believe you have a more accurate word to convey them? Parochial perfectly conveys the combination of ignorance, narrow perspective and pettiness. What would you use with the same meaning?
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Do you want to have a go at re-wording it? I'm assuming "parochialism" is what you have an issue with, but I'm struggling to think of what else sounds better and conveys the same meaning. https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/parochial https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/parochial <--- those are all pretty crap
LAC-Tech 4y ago
You know you're getting older when people start getting nostalgic for things you still think of as new.
sumnole 4y ago
If you miss GeoCities, you can get your modern fix through NeoCities: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/

quickthrower2 4y ago

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.

squarefoot 4y ago
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.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  See also: Blog Rolls (which I think are better).

Jyaif 4y ago

Just the other day I was talking about webrings and how some discord servers are emulating this by having "partnered communities".

hammock 4y ago

Ok for those a little younger who don’t remember webrings- remember stumbleupon?

EamonnMR 4y ago
I found so much cool stuff on StumbleUpon.
ehecatl42 4y ago
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"?

rendall 4y ago

> "...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.

buzzert 4y ago

They still exist, and are really fun! I'm part of a community that has a webring and a Mastodon instance: https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/

avidphantasm 4y ago

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.

Waterluvian 4y ago
Indeed. If it wasn’t impossible, it was probably easy. Because there was just so little to it back then. The good news is that it’s just as easy today to make those simple websites.
brigandish 4y ago
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.
- jxf 4y ago
  See: Microsoft Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    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.
gog 4y ago
They are still easy to build if you want to build the same site you would be building back then.
- blooalien 4y ago
  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.

anjel 4y ago

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 https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

aimor 4y ago

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.

JohnFen 4y ago
So much awesome stuff was lost from those days, and was never replaced.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Don't be a doomer. We have the technology.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    It's not really an issue of technology.
amatecha 4y ago
I do this! I've categorized them, and for many of them I even describe them! http://matecha.net/links/ http://matecha.net/links/ (also note the http, to allow older systems to connect. https also supported of course)
- creamynebula 4y ago
  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.

samstave 4y ago

They were afraid, and things got hot, what we normally call in the industry; BBQ Chicken Webrings.

amatecha 4y ago

There are a few active webrings I'm aware of, and their participants are pretty active and use them as a way to explore a slice of the web https://fediring.net/ https://fediring.net/ https://ring.fediverse.radio/ https://ring.fediverse.radio/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ Further, one acquaintance has built a search engine specifically for web rings: https://github.com/cblgh/lieu https://github.com/cblgh/lieu

jrnichols 4y ago

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.

thomond 4y ago

There's something seedy about the term webring I just can't identify.

thewebcount 4y ago
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.

casualwriter 4y ago

Webring was great. Missing it like missing old good day which everything is fresh and good. Now have to dig in junk for good thing, rarely fresh.

phforms 4y ago

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.

lapcat 4y ago

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?"

davidpfarrell 4y ago

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. Exciting times !

gsempe 4y ago
Who is owning the WebRing brand now? I would be happy to discuss ways to bring it back in the modern web!
- davidpfarrell 4y ago
  All of the servers (co-located: so old school amiright!?) are gone and domain names have been relinquished. I'm honestly not sure why the current webring.com has a history section on it since the site doesn't appear to anything else useful. Just occurred to me that, if you were designing this today, you wouldn't choose "webring.com" ... It would be Ringz.io, or wbr.ng or Loop.ly or somesuch :)

wozname 4y ago

My Dad runs a website for his Meccano hobby, and as far as I know their webring is still active: http://nzfmm.co.nz/ http://nzfmm.co.nz/ https://meccano.link/ https://meccano.link/ I was definitely surprised to see an active web ring.

Brajeshwar 4y ago

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 https://notes.oinam.com (very rough around the edges, lots of broken links, yet to even have a pattern to start tidying up). 1. https://9rules.com https://9rules.com

sinenomine 4y ago

Webrings are very much alive, see for yourself: https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://fediring.net https://fediring.net https://getimiskon.neocities.org/gr/lainring.html https://getimiskon.neocities.org/gr/lainring.html

thewebcount 4y ago

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.

jerglingu 4y ago
"join my webring" was something of a meme before memes were a thing

jefftk 4y ago

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/ https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring/

bullen 4y ago

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. It's lost in time, like tears in rain.

ridgered4 4y ago
> 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.
- bullen 4y ago
  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.

deafpolygon 4y ago

Then social media came along and put the final nail in its coffin.