I'm not sure I see the difference in curation between a webring and a "other cool sites" list, except that in the webring case there needs to be a central curat

I'm not sure I see the difference in curation between a webring and a "other cool sites" list, except that in the webring case there needs to be a central curator across several sites, so it's effectively just a single person's "other cool sites" list spread across several sites. "Other cool sites" lists were quite popular back then. That's what I used for site discovery instead of webrings.