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.
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.
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.
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.
Because search engines (Google) and centralised blogging services (WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, later Twitter, Facebook, etc.) offer better user experience and discoverability than webrings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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). 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.
> 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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"?
> "...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eh, i guess if you had a basic level of ability and knowledge of not just HTML, but also the ability to upload files over FTP, register a domain, set up the DNS records to point your domain to your host.
but most of the people building wix or squarespace (or whatever all the youtuber and podcasters are promoting this week), they don't have that knowledge and don't necessarily want to learn it. easier for you doesn't mean easier for everybody.
Geocities and the like had ways to put up a website without much expertise by the late 1990s.
Many ISPs included personal web hosting with their internet access service at the time as well, which usually did require a slightly higher level of knowledge, but not that high. Netscape had a point and click page editor by 1997.
> You only needed to learn some HTML. There was no CSS, no JS…
The page linked in response is mostly CSS, and (I just went to a laptops to check) the first few lines are javascript google tags.
I think the original point was supposed to be that websites used to be just content wrapped in some simple HTML, which was easy to learn. But now the level of complexity is higher and so is the barrier to entry. I agree with this point.
So when someone replied saying “what’s stopping you from [building simple HTML sites] in 2022, thats what I did”, I was confused to see a site that included JS and was mostly CSS. Because it was seemingly trying to contradict a point about no CSS and JS. Honestly it feels like spam.
Its tangental, but I agree the source seems hand written and seems to have a well done minimalist approach, which is respectable. I regret the negative tone to my original response.
You only needed to learn some HTML. There was no CSS, no JS, server-side rendering was non-existent or limited to some very specific features provided by your host (visitor counters were popular, maybe even a guestbook where visitors could leave a message if you wanted to get fancy!).
Yeah, I remember ~2000 or so it seemed like a lot of non-techie people were creating their own personal site on Geocities/Angelfire/etc. In high schools lots of teenagers (again, including non-techie folk) had their own web pages.
What was nice is that more thought went into it, since it was basically a blank canvas. There also was a focus on quality over quantity - your website was something you continually grew and improved. Modern content is something you churn out and forget about immediately after.
But as easier options became available, those sites disappeared. First blogs came along, which were more structured. And modern social media is even more structured as well. We went from a single blank canvas you could spend hours tinkering with to a coloring book page you're given for sixty seconds before it gets thrown away and you're given the next one.
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
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.
I do this! I've categorized them, and for many of them I even describe them! http://matecha.net/links/ (also note the http, to allow older systems to connect. https also supported of course)
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.
I don't advocate for their content but the way they've built things is pretty great.
I've described it as "the 1998 web with better cgi scripts".
Also search engines like marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu) and teclis (https://teclis.com/) are nice - they essentially filter out pages with advertisements and trackers which is a pretty brilliant way to defeat SEO farms and other low quality content with ulterior motives.
To see their effectiveness give it a challenge. Try queries like "how to lose weight" or heck, "lasagna recipe".
To demonstrate, I just took the time to make two videos for "lasagna recipe" with the network tab of chrome's inspector window open:
Along with recipe sites, there's recently been a crop of similar looking tech help sites that basically give w3schools level answers with a bunch of rotating ads based on the hypothesis that users will look at the content, then focus on their work for the next hour or two, keeping the tab open because that's just the common pattern while the ad rotations go on the page.
As far as serving ads go, programming and recipe sites exhibit similar usage patterns. Similar to recipe sites, the answers you came for are interleaved with ads in the hope that people drag their cursor over the banner ad while selecting text from the site or at least keep that part in the viewport open for the duration of the activity. What a lovely feature!
Search has to be driven by axioms of values and purpose because different intents yield different results. There is no silver bullet.
For example, google, bing and yandex's goals are pretty antithetical to mine unless I'm actively trying to buy something. On google, I came for a lasagna recipe and someone tried to sell me car parts and a home mortgage which is fine. Those engines are just a poorly chosen tool for that job.
>Tor sites do all of this still.
I like browing onion sites from time to time, typically personal sites. It is resemblant of the wild west days of the web, except most onion sites are for drugs.
There's a new flood of people who don't mind mixing violence with their politics, hate groups, and a few fascinating libraries that are vast archives of incendiary frauds, quacks and malicious propagandists of the past.
Many countries free speech rules are more restrictive than the United States when it comes to hate speech and calls for violence and insurrection.
I've been meaning to scrape those archives and email academic historians with a Dropbox link. Historical hateful screeds and conspiratorial fabrications are actually hard to come by (think of say, political opportunists trying to capitalize on the 1932 Bonus March with self serving conspiracies).
It's a long list of mostly self-published pamphlets, newsletters and books. When these mountebanks pass on since they were never actually affiliated with legitimate institutions, their papers don't get cared for.
This also goes back to the search problem. GBY explicitly excludes the most virulent and harmful of this material. Fine. Agreed. Totally legitimate. But there's no way to say "I'm interested in folklore and sociology, I know it's all fiction".
People take action, sometimes murderous, based on these fraudsters. For the purpose of crafting policy, laws, and documenting manipulation techniques for media literacy, there should be a quarantined place where their lies go instead of being intentionally scrubbed after it manifests some awful tragedy. Maybe that would be a good candidate for a separate search tool.
There's some decent ML work with NLP there since (1) many things are anti-semitic dog-whistles (such as Alex Jones using the term Globalist) and would probably cluster really nicely with the quiet part using seq2seq, word2vec and might even be achievable unsupervised, and (2) many of them are just crude copy/paste amalgamations from older hate sheets, like the protocols, secret world government by spiridovich or waters flowing eastward by fry; oftentimes with merely the names and events updated to be more contemporary while usually throwing a different oppressed group under the bus such as immigrants or trans people. In the results you could display this: "See side by side comparison with this literature from the British Union of Fascists" where you clearly demonstrate some "truth about gays" is just a crude find and replace of say "truth about jews" from 1935.
It might also be helpful to assuage the victims who are falling into these libelous traps by clearly demonstrating how obvious the fakery is. Of course some seem to lack the cognitive wherewithal regardless of the clarity of the evidence but we might as well give it a go.
People started to think about linking as a way of "losing" Pagerank.
Stuffing keywords.
And the worst of all, content length. People started writing long articles to keep the Search God happy, most of the times with little added value and a diluted information density, making readers lose time to keep the Gods happy.
Then social networks took over and it was even worse. Most people ditched their own sites or never started one, a friend who is a photographer lost his FB/Instagram accounts a couple of days ago and now understands what I was talking about when I told him he should have some content in a domain he controls.
I really like these lists, especially this long. Since I saw something interesting in the first couple of links/descriptions, I bookmarked it and will go through it soon. For me, this is what the internet was meant for. I'm also collecting interesting links to share publicly on my website(s), in a sort of webring/blogroll kinda way.
Isn't this called a blogroll, this list of links? In my company's website software, we built a module that combines webrings with blogrolls. We just call it 'shared links'. It's plain simple, because it's the most stupid basic thing one can do with the web: have links to other interesting content. And it's also a curated list of links. Real human recommendations.
113 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
FTFY.
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.n...
That looks neat...
Oh.Webrings were like the 8-track tape of the internet.
Did webrings have more features than just the list of sites, like voting and stuff? I honestly don't remember.
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). 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.
Actually, he wrote it himself to support static websites.[1]
Naturally.
[0] https://drewdevault.com
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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 nostalgia is a permanent feature of the Internet, so is the paroch...{EDIT} ear-shredding squee of fanbois.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.
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?
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 <--- those are all pretty crap
https://neocities.org/
Maybe there's a swing back in that direction with the "fediverse"?
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.
The good news is that it’s just as easy today to make those simple websites.
but most of the people building wix or squarespace (or whatever all the youtuber and podcasters are promoting this week), they don't have that knowledge and don't necessarily want to learn it. easier for you doesn't mean easier for everybody.
Many ISPs included personal web hosting with their internet access service at the time as well, which usually did require a slightly higher level of knowledge, but not that high. Netscape had a point and click page editor by 1997.
That's how I wrote my homepage
https://lewiscampbell.tech
Your home page clearly uses CSS and judging by how it jerks around when I scroll there is plenty of JS too.
where did they claim they didnt use CSS? CSS can be handwritten too.
> and judging by how it jerks around when I scroll there is plenty of JS too.
Maybe be less judgemental and more looking at facts then, because there isn't.
The page linked in response is mostly CSS, and (I just went to a laptops to check) the first few lines are javascript google tags.
I think the original point was supposed to be that websites used to be just content wrapped in some simple HTML, which was easy to learn. But now the level of complexity is higher and so is the barrier to entry. I agree with this point.
So when someone replied saying “what’s stopping you from [building simple HTML sites] in 2022, thats what I did”, I was confused to see a site that included JS and was mostly CSS. Because it was seemingly trying to contradict a point about no CSS and JS. Honestly it feels like spam.
Its tangental, but I agree the source seems hand written and seems to have a well done minimalist approach, which is respectable. I regret the negative tone to my original response.
> The page linked in response [...]
The page was not linked in response. It was a sibling comment.
It does use CSS, but most of it is inline. $EDITOR index.html, as you say :)
judging by how it jerks around when I scroll there is plenty of JS too.
There's no JS save GA, but I appreciate the heads up.
If you could give details on what setup you saw jerky scrolling on - screen size, OS, browser, zoom level - I'd be much obliged.
What was nice is that more thought went into it, since it was basically a blank canvas. There also was a focus on quality over quantity - your website was something you continually grew and improved. Modern content is something you churn out and forget about immediately after.
But as easier options became available, those sites disappeared. First blogs came along, which were more structured. And modern social media is even more structured as well. We went from a single blank canvas you could spend hours tinkering with to a coloring book page you're given for sixty seconds before it gets thrown away and you're given the next one.
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.
I don't advocate for their content but the way they've built things is pretty great.
I've described it as "the 1998 web with better cgi scripts".
Also search engines like marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu) and teclis (https://teclis.com/) are nice - they essentially filter out pages with advertisements and trackers which is a pretty brilliant way to defeat SEO farms and other low quality content with ulterior motives.
To see their effectiveness give it a challenge. Try queries like "how to lose weight" or heck, "lasagna recipe".
To demonstrate, I just took the time to make two videos for "lasagna recipe" with the network tab of chrome's inspector window open:
google's first result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntC5ZcgxyD4
teclis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GULoL8o6NDA
Along with recipe sites, there's recently been a crop of similar looking tech help sites that basically give w3schools level answers with a bunch of rotating ads based on the hypothesis that users will look at the content, then focus on their work for the next hour or two, keeping the tab open because that's just the common pattern while the ad rotations go on the page.
As far as serving ads go, programming and recipe sites exhibit similar usage patterns. Similar to recipe sites, the answers you came for are interleaved with ads in the hope that people drag their cursor over the banner ad while selecting text from the site or at least keep that part in the viewport open for the duration of the activity. What a lovely feature!
Search has to be driven by axioms of values and purpose because different intents yield different results. There is no silver bullet.
For example, google, bing and yandex's goals are pretty antithetical to mine unless I'm actively trying to buy something. On google, I came for a lasagna recipe and someone tried to sell me car parts and a home mortgage which is fine. Those engines are just a poorly chosen tool for that job.
There's a new flood of people who don't mind mixing violence with their politics, hate groups, and a few fascinating libraries that are vast archives of incendiary frauds, quacks and malicious propagandists of the past.
Many countries free speech rules are more restrictive than the United States when it comes to hate speech and calls for violence and insurrection.
I've been meaning to scrape those archives and email academic historians with a Dropbox link. Historical hateful screeds and conspiratorial fabrications are actually hard to come by (think of say, political opportunists trying to capitalize on the 1932 Bonus March with self serving conspiracies).
It's a long list of mostly self-published pamphlets, newsletters and books. When these mountebanks pass on since they were never actually affiliated with legitimate institutions, their papers don't get cared for.
This also goes back to the search problem. GBY explicitly excludes the most virulent and harmful of this material. Fine. Agreed. Totally legitimate. But there's no way to say "I'm interested in folklore and sociology, I know it's all fiction".
People take action, sometimes murderous, based on these fraudsters. For the purpose of crafting policy, laws, and documenting manipulation techniques for media literacy, there should be a quarantined place where their lies go instead of being intentionally scrubbed after it manifests some awful tragedy. Maybe that would be a good candidate for a separate search tool.
There's some decent ML work with NLP there since (1) many things are anti-semitic dog-whistles (such as Alex Jones using the term Globalist) and would probably cluster really nicely with the quiet part using seq2seq, word2vec and might even be achievable unsupervised, and (2) many of them are just crude copy/paste amalgamations from older hate sheets, like the protocols, secret world government by spiridovich or waters flowing eastward by fry; oftentimes with merely the names and events updated to be more contemporary while usually throwing a different oppressed group under the bus such as immigrants or trans people. In the results you could display this: "See side by side comparison with this literature from the British Union of Fascists" where you clearly demonstrate some "truth about gays" is just a crude find and replace of say "truth about jews" from 1935.
It might also be helpful to assuage the victims who are falling into these libelous traps by clearly demonstrating how obvious the fakery is. Of course some seem to lack the cognitive wherewithal regardless of the clarity of the evidence but we might as well give it a go.
People started to think about linking as a way of "losing" Pagerank.
Stuffing keywords.
And the worst of all, content length. People started writing long articles to keep the Search God happy, most of the times with little added value and a diluted information density, making readers lose time to keep the Gods happy.
Then social networks took over and it was even worse. Most people ditched their own sites or never started one, a friend who is a photographer lost his FB/Instagram accounts a couple of days ago and now understands what I was talking about when I told him he should have some content in a domain he controls.
Instagram doesn't even allow more than one link.