[dragontamer]

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.

[swatcoder]

> maintain them

Maintain what?

They’re documents. They document things. As long as there’s a tool that knows how to parse the document, which is outside the role of the author, the document remains complete. There’s nothing to maintain.

The contemporary fetish for timely ephemera is a quirk of social media feeds and a generation that grew up immersed in them, not some baseline criteria for how the internet needs to work.

As automated search engines and social media feeds continue to drown in spam and engagement-porn, expect to see a resurgence of hand-curated web rings, directories, and marginalia-like scoped search engines, that variously highlight timely, historical, and evergreen content.

You’ll be surprised what an untouched document from 5 or 15 or 25 years ago might reveal to you, once you can actually find them again.

[dragontamer]

> Maintain what?

Okay, you're kidding me right? Have you actually used Webrings?

Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links?

Answer: you can't. Its basically lost information. Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses.

There's a __reason__ why we stopped doing Webrings when Geocities stopped being popular. I've lived Geocities -> Homestead -> Xenga -> Myspace -> Facebook. At no point did anyone ever care to go back to webrings.

And suddenly here we are like 20+ years later, where people who clearly never used them are suddenly pretending that it was webrings that made the early internet great. Erm, no. I guess they were a sign of the times... but they weren't good or great by any means. We have better means of sharing links with each other today.

--------

Links die. Alarmingly quickly. Even today where people try to have long-lived links for SEO purposes and have specifically programmed scripts to help make links live longer... links still die and thus webrings break.

We didn't know how bad link-rot was at the time of webrings.

> You’ll be surprised what an untouched document from 5 or 15 or 25 years ago might reveal to you, once you can actually find them again.

Good luck. Geocities literally died. Yes, there's an entire archival process was undertaken to try to save Geocities, but I'm sure we missed some info.

Any webring pointing to a Geocities site today will absolutely 404 error out. You've already got to change all the links to point to the various archives (ex: Neocities IIRC has at least the most popular pages archived).

Now I ask: were you really around for the time of webrings?

[swatcoder]

> were you really around for the time of webrings?

Yup.

> Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses.

Nope. Not then, when IFRAMEs or a pre-CORS AJAX call delegated ring maintenance upstream, and not now, when we have about 1500 more ways to delegate it. Was there a short period where they were as crude as you describe? Sure, but that's not really relevant to the forward-looking discussion of what they would look like now or the backward-looking discussion of what they looked like in the many years where they were mature and popular.

[constantly]

I can’t arbitrate here, but can add my anecdote to bolster what the person above is saying: I regularly remember clicking next on webrings and eventually getting a 404 with no way to progress. This was fairly regular to the extent that I sometimes just avoided clicking the webring modal.

[autoexec]

Yeah, I remember it both ways. Sometimes you'd click on a link at the bottom of one page to hit a dead end, but you could also go to the homepage of the webring itself and you could navigate through the sites in an iframe where you'd still run into a bunch of 404s, but you'd at least still have a "next" button in a separate frame so you could roll the dice again.

Webrings require maintenance to be useful and worth using, just like search engines do. The better maintained and curated they are, the more useful they will be.

[dragontamer]

> just like search engines do

Given how easy it is to run PostgreSQL and full text search these days, I think boutique search engines for small communities makes more sense than a webring.

[praisewhitey]

>Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links?

An example of this from the OP link. The page links to a11y-webring.club which has prev/next/random buttons that all produce this error:

This function has crashed

An unhandled error in the function code triggered the following message:

Runtime.UserCodeSyntaxError - SyntaxError: Unexpected token ':'

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

Imagine if this criticism was levied at books.

James Clavell obviously doesn't care about Shogun, why ... it hasn't changed for years!?!?!

[JohnFen]

> 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.

[dragontamer]

The US Military was still doing horse cavalry charges during WW2 in the Philippines even as battleships, carriers, and tanks charged forth.

There's a lot of "momentum" to technologies. I'm personally convinced that webrings are one of those ideas that died for good reason. There's just easier ways to organize ourselves online.

I promise you: if you want a big list of links to follow, just start a Wiki. Or share them in your own Lemmy / Mastodon. Or open up your own Subreddit. Its going to be easier.

----------

If you want to rebuild the feeling of early community-driven internet, then you should be looking up IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org/), and not just trying to resurrect random technologies from 30 years ago.

[JohnFen]

> I'm personally convinced that webrings are one of those ideas that died for good reason.

Except that nothing came up that replaced them.

> if you want a big list of links to follow, just start a Wiki.

What wasn't the purpose of webrings, though.

I have no special love for webrings as a mechanism. I do have a love for what they did socially, though. If something else came along that served the same purpose, that would be awesome -- but so far, nothing has. I think that the main reason for that is that the web itself has changed from a place for people to a place for commerce.

[dragontamer]

Social bonds are formed by humans, not technology. In effect, the technology used is almost a side-effect. You can build social bonds through emails, letters, walking and talking with people.

Today, kids are using Google Documents to communicate with each other in classrooms (ie: sharing links, collaborating on homework, etc. etc.), They don't need Webrings to share a set of links that happen to be on the same subject. In fact, you don't need any real tech at all, it could all just be a bulletin board, it could be a phone number that you leave somewhere with a computer hooked up that everyone connects with a 300 baud modem to. Etc. etc.

Or ya know, a Tweet, a Reddit post, a Facebook message. A google group. Etc. etc.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

People who are arguing for webrings are not claiming they're easier. It turns out, if easy is your only metric, Everest would never have been climbed.

[bluSCALE4]

Yeah, not sure if you lived through webrings because I don't think anyone that used them would agree.

[dragontamer]

You click until you find a broken link in the chain and then everything goes to crap.

When you have A, B, C, D, and E, all different webmasters on different parts of the internet making a webring of A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> A, things get really messed up when C stops responding to emails.

As others have said: you need a ringmaster for this to work. When C stops responding to emails, you tell B to update their page and point to D, for example.

------------------

We have so many more technologies today than we did in the 90s. I don't know why anyone would look back at freaking Webrings when we have... I dunno... Wikis?

Now the Wiki administrator (A), could recruit B, C, D, and E to be moderators on the same Wiki. When C stops responding to emails, everything keeps going just fine.

Etc. etc.

I don't think anyone who actually lived in the 90s with directory services, Ask Jeeves, and Webrings would ever think about bringing those services back. Like, the good stuff were IRC, AIM, IRQ, USENET ?

[amlib]

I think you have missed the point, it's more about decentralization and increasing "locality" of the internet, get people close to each other or with shared interest to have their own communities. Webrings may not be all that great of solution technically but it does the job in that front.

Like in your wiki example, if A falls, now you don't have A B C D E F... well, the whole alphabet is gone :)

[dragontamer]

> Like in your wiki example, if A falls, now you don't have A B C D E F... well, the whole alphabet is gone :)

Its far more likely for random individuals of a webring to disappear in my experience.

Ex: A could be the starting point of the webring. When C disappears, then D, E, and F are inaccessible. (A -> B -> Broken page).

A wiki is a single point of failure: you make A more reliable so that everyone has the information. A webring is an infinite number of single points of failure: a single failure (broken link / 404, etc. etc.) messes the entire ring up. Its horrible.

[bluSCALE4]

Webrings don't have to be maintained, they just have to be up. They are snapshots in time that provide lots of information. Authors typically put in a lot of effort, unfiltered. The individuals voice shining through is the goal, learning more through links is a plus.

[imgabe]

Link aggregation sites don't work well as a reference. They're just the links that are popular that day. Aside from the wiki pages for some subreddits, they don't do a good job of storing a definitive set of links on some subject.