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by JohnFen 951 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
dragontamer 951 days ago
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.

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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.

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JohnFen 950 days ago
> 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.

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dragontamer 950 days ago
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.

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PH95VuimJjqBqy 950 days ago
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.
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