I believe webrings could still be great discoverability and serendipity tools for smaller communities today. They could provide a curative answer to the failure

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.