[HN Gopher] We Need to Bring Back Webrings
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We Need to Bring Back Webrings
Author : abahlo
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-11-14 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arne.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (arne.me)
| estambar wrote:
| This webring isn't so much a ring as a wire, as one of the
| websites doesn't have the footer. This was always the problem
| with webrings in the first place - one broken link in the chain
| ruins it for everyone.
|
| Just like token ring based LANs
| gerikson wrote:
| Just rebrand them as WebDAGs.
| estambar wrote:
| I kind of like this idea, but then instead of just left and
| right arrows I want to be able to travel in a multi-
| dimensional space :)
| appplication wrote:
| This could be pretty basic browser extension. A little
| banner at the top or bottom: "websites like this one"
| scottyah wrote:
| Or website curators all agree on a /webring.txt file
| (similar to a robots.txt) where they list websites they
| think are similar?
| JohnFen wrote:
| An important part of what made webrings good, though, was
| that they were curated (some more than others, but
| still...)
|
| Having sites just list others the site owners think are
| similar is just the site providing a list of links to
| "friend sites" -- which also used to be a common thing.
| That's also fun and useful, but not what webrings are
| about.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Links between websites in a sort of hyper-dimensional
| space! A...hyper-link?
| brnt wrote:
| Last I checked, rings were usually cyclic.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Directed acyclic graphs?
| bsuvc wrote:
| It should be possible to periodicallt crawl the ring
| participants and exclude them if they don't have the footer,
| right?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, good webrings always needed an active ringmaster.
|
| I do think webrings are badly needed again, though, to serve
| the same purpose they were developed for in the first place:
| discoverability.
|
| It's become very difficult to find the good (according to my
| tastes) websites these days.
| anemoknee wrote:
| Web rung?
| wrycoder wrote:
| https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
| mattw2121 wrote:
| Honestly what I really want is the return of DMOZ. A curated,
| categorized list of the best sites.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, I miss DMOZ more and more as time goes on, as well.
| drooopy wrote:
| There was a spiritual successor to dmoz: curlie.org
| smetj wrote:
| Awesome! I couldn't agree more! Thank you.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related last week:
|
| _Ask HN: Why is there no effort to bring back webrings?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177128
|
| And this thread with some 'rings and related threads listed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37577861
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that link-aggregation sites, like Hacker News,
| Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, and Lemmy have taken the place of
| Webrings.
|
| The sad truth about webpages is that people don't want to
| maintain them. People will put in their weekend project, and then
| the webpage sits there for the rest of eternity whether or not
| its relevant, and then what? When do you update the webring so
| that they add and/or remove pages?
|
| Here's another idea: you put up links regularly to a webpage that
| dynamically sorts them by popularity, relevance, and date. Oh
| wait, that's Reddit.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I'm fairly certain that link-aggregation sites, like Hacker
| News, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, and Lemmy have taken the place of
| Webrings.
|
| Link aggregation sites serve a completely different purpose
| from webrings, and don't substitute for them. That's why for
| many years, link aggregation sites and webrings coexisted.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Yeah, not sure if you lived through webrings because I don't
| think anyone that used them would agree.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| My partner works in corporate communications and so we frequently
| lament the enshitification, specifically the way social media as
| a concept destroyed so many things and now is experiencing its
| own gotterdammerung. It feels like at the moment we are in a
| middle place, waiting for the next trend. Perhaps it will be a
| return to the super personalization of the 1990s, where everyone
| was making content of their own and expressing themselves online
| with their own flavors before the "platformization" came along.
| Post-Covid there appears to be a resurgence in community, in
| "authenticity" so logically it follows that our online engagement
| might follow a similar pattern.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yeah, can't wait to monetize that! Oh, darn...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Sure.. with todays net, you'll end up with 100's of frameworks to
| implement the chain, probably based on the block-chain tech. Then
| don't forget the WRaaS, webrings as a service, paid subscription,
| NFTs, sponsored webrings followed by AI Web Rings. And maybe a
| bag of onion rings to go with it.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I was thinking about this less an hour ago
|
| Specifically I want my personal site to be a part of a "web 1.0"
| ring, where everyone uses technology that predates web 2.0
| frameworks (Wordpress, AWS, CF etc...) and you generally roll
| your own everything.
| walterbell wrote:
| Publish a post listing such sites, with a page title of "Web
| 1.0 Webring", accepting pull requests for additions?
|
| If/when it grows too big, someone can add software for
| collaborative maintenance.
|
| Starting point:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/caezeo/web_10_era_w...
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| It is not a ring, but it can help you feel like it is: Someone
| shared this search site a while back:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
|
| It is a pretty great way to find smaller and more personal
| websites.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Tangential, but one thing I noticed recently is how algorithms on
| sites like twitter and linkedin - especially linkedin - will
| penalize posts that contain external links. So it's very hard to
| even tell people about content on your own site. HN might be one
| of the few places left that don't seem to do that.
|
| Thinking more - what used to be common is a section called "other
| cool sites" or something similar, which would just be a list of
| sites to check out the author put there. Maybe that's a bit more
| robust than a ring.
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(page generated 2023-11-14 23:00 UTC)