[mlok]

A few years ago a few links on HN talked about "the small web", webrings, and drove me to a trove of amazing original little websites exploring the possibilities offered by the web 1.0 mostly. Just like back in the days. And some of them were real pieces of art. I never managed to find them again. For example I remember a website that told a story in the form of a calendar you gad to scroll down, it found it so creative that I felt the same amazement as my first steps with the web in '95.

[mlok]

This was my latest comment on HN, when, 5 days later, I stumbled upon this comment at the top of a random dicussion, and it was exactly that calendar story I was looking for all these years. So here it is for reference, if anyone happen to be interested :

HN comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071855

calendar story : https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

[stevenicr]

Indeed, webrings and 'blogrolls' were awesome - a great way to share the web.

Then google came in and started penalizing web sites for outbound links.

Then everyone stopped the blogrolls and the webrings disappeared - and people even got stingy with linking to a site in a blog post.

Sure, blame 'shady seo' or what have you - and yeah that became a thing, but the real blame is google. Pushing sites down google was such a scary thing that wordpress took the previously-in-core linkroll out in future updates - even if you have a blogroll with just friends - it was removed - many did not know - and if you did, you had to go install a plugin to bring the functionality back.

Of course the better options would of been to just auto-nofollow tag all the blogroll links - share the web and not to worry about a google penalty or being associated with 'spooky sounds "bad nieghborhood" in google's alog-eyes'

I'd love to see web rings brought back with auto-nofollow added - and a stats system that was open to all who installed / used it for webring X Y or Z - and blogrolls that are easy to nofollow.. better with hover preview / a note about why you love site Y or what have you.

It would be better for the web, but it's not easy to do currently and not a big benefit for the work right now.

Anyone remember when the search engines had a web ring to try the search at other engines at the bottom?

[unraveller]

Web Mentions are kind of a replacement for webrings. The problem with web mentions is that it takes one or two manual steps and might as well be link-only comments.

Google are practically unqualified to separate genuine content from spam. What's their reason to serve users who can be endlessly contented with externally recommended content? That's effectively ad-blocking at the mental level to them. If we could invent some ubiquitous on-page discovery mechanism we'd have big tech over a barrel.

[mlok]

Maybe the web 1.0 was for exploring ?

Maybe the web 2.0 changed that ?

[stevenicr]

I thought web 2.0 was supposed to be easier sharing,

I'd say it was what, web 2.5 (?) where many started raising the drawbridges and closing off the wall gardens; making it harder to explore / share.

google, fbook, even insta, and I'm sure others purposefully making it harder for the little sites to be discovered, kind of the opposite of what web 2.0 was supposed to bring.