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Why there is no effort to bring webrings back as search quality has declined?

9 points by arromatic ↗ HN
and personal websites are getting harder to find ? Can't we start a new community led project to bring back webrings ? The closes thing I saw was a few unpopular attempts on github but thats all. Maybe hackernews users who has a blog can start a webring

15 comments

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PaulHoule
I want to to see bulk RSS feeds of independent blogs.

My RSS reader YOShInOn uses superfeedr to ingest RSS feeds which I am highly satisfied with except that it costs 10 cents/feed per month. If a feed gets 100 items a day it is a bargain. I have a $10 a month bill right now, ingest about 100 feeds and get about 3000 items a day.

I'd like to add a few hundred independent blogs but it would be crazy expensive for a small amount of content. I could build my own RSS crawling infrastructure but no matter how you slice it, polling all those feeds would be a hassle. There used to be quite a few instances of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)

but today I've only found a handful worth pointing YOShInOn at and I'd like to see more.

arromatic
I was thinking more of a discovery problem like how will you find independent blogs that are worth adding to your rss feed ? hackernews is just one option which has very few blogs and most are tech related. Which is why i think the webrings will solve as the the websites list will be curated
PaulHoule
YOShInOn fundamentally changes the relationship with RSS feeds in that I don't read 100% of what it ingests. In the last run (I do one every two and half days on average, I think) it ingested 7000 articles and sampled 300 to show me. That's a bit less than 5%. I have screens that let me see what came from particular feed, things that fall into automatically generated clusters (roughly "sports", "ukraine war", "neural networks", ...) and that the it thinks y'all (Hacker News readers) will upvote or comment on.

The main screen looks like TikTok for text, it shows me one article at a time that I can thumbs up or thumbs down.

Even in 2001 I was saying that "Failing RSS readers keep failing with the same failing user interfaces that always fail..." in particular anything with a "mark as read" button is putting an undue burden on the user, there is nothing inspiring about interfaces that look like a mail reader or a USENET reader or that have 20 boxes with a list of items in them for 20 different feeds.

Personally I want to subscribe to RSS feeds even if they aren't 100% great because my system does a very good job of filtering good stuff to the top so I am happy to subscribe first and discover later.

sharemywin
I wouldn't mind paying if the most of the $10 went to the blog owners.
PaulHoule
The problem is I'd have no trouble finding 1000 RSS feeds in which case it is $100 a month instead of $10. As you say, it wouldn't be so bad if it went to the owners but it doesn't as there isn't really any mechanism in place to do that, but maybe an aggregated feed built to do that from the beginning would be a practical way to do that.
jfengel
Hacker News is the replacement for web rings. It points to various personal web sites and sources of tech-related amusement.

I don't think personal web sites are any harder to find. I think that your expectations have changed since the 1990s. Back then, everything was new, and practically everything on the web was targeted to a narrow set of people. Now there's just more stuff, and you get FOMO looking at any particular one. Sites that seemed "entertainingly random" a quarter-century ago are now merely other people's drivel.

I don't think web rings are going to bring back the period you want. But I think there's way more content than you can possibly consume that is at least as good. HN will link you to dozens of new blogs every day.

They'll be drivel, but they were always drivel. Web rings won't change the fact that you have a lower tolerance for the drivel than you used to.

arromatic
It's kind of funny but i actually never experienced webrings or old web. I only started using internet a few years ago. I found them in archive org wayback machine and fell down the rabbit hole.
FLpxpyJ
The #1 Webring List on the Internet (by Ray "brisray" Thomas): https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm

They are coming back. No, they will never be as prominent as search engines, despite how crappy they've (Google in particular) has gotten. You wanna find personal websites? It's not hard you just gotta put in a little effort: https://foreverliketh.is/blog/exploring-the-personal-web/

A lot of those collectives are even curated, like the one made by a Hacker News user recently: https://dm.hn/

This isn't just to OP, it's to the rest of you as well: The Personal Web has never been more dead. But also perhaps never as alive. If you care at all about it, you'd take part, contribute and connect.

ajxs
I run the https://webri.ng platform. It's a platform that lets users create their own webrings without any coding required. This might come in handy if anyone here wanted to create a webring.