[galaxyLogic]

Not sure I get it. Why a "ring"? Why not just have a list of web-site URLs on a page and share that page with your friends and ask them to put that page somewhere on their site?

"Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Isn't it better to provide a list of links so users can choose where they want to go "next"?

And why should I have to go around the whole "ring" to get back to where I started from? The Web is based on hyperlinks, not "hyper-rings".

[verandaguy]

I always felt similarly about webrings as I did about demoscene. It's less about being strictly practical and more about just a fun little thing you made with your friends. I'd argue that in this day and age, building something from the ground up to be suboptimal by design is a little protest against the quantification and hustle-fication of everything all the time.

Having it be a ring has the nice side effect that anyone closing a ring on your site (or adding your site to it) gets an idea of how everyone in the ring met.

It's more of a fuzzy social thing than a "let's represent social relationships in the most semantically accurate way possible" thing, and for people, I think that knowing how everyone met eachother is a nice thing. You can plan gettogethers off of that. It also keeps people socially accountable; if someone in the group turns out to be a dick, they can just be skipped in the webring.

[embedding-shape]

It doesn't neccessarly have to be such a "ring" that you navigate from website #1 to website #2 and the order is always the same, and you cannot jump, or even do random browsing.

I think initially the idea was mainly around the "ring" concept, but relatively quickly lots of different implementations did lots of different things, and we still called those "webrings" even though many weren't conceptually "rings" at all, more like "lists of websites that are kind of somewhat about the same thing, sometimes". There was typically a "Random" button/link too, and index, sometimes categories and more.

It can be a list of websites, with random order, the main point is people's websites linking to other people's websites, in some way, that it could eventually circle back somehow, then you have a webring.

[galaxyLogic]

So part of it seems to be working together: I link to your site with the expectation that you link back to mine. Not a bad idea, also letting the site-creators coordinate who focuses on which sub-topic. But are there many examples of this in the real web?

[tracker1]

Web-rings were really common in the later 90's... Mostly based on topic or focus of the site(s) in question. It was a common discovery mechanism... you'd usually have prev/next/random/list links, where you could navigate via prev or next, but also jump to a random site int he ring or to a list of sites in the ring.

It's nice to see some old ideas like this come back... also hoping to see more self-hosted conversational sites around topics of interest (bulletin boards) over the giant social media sites we have today.

[embedding-shape]

> I link to your site with the expectation that you link back to mine.

I guess, but more collectively, so like "We both agree to share a list of websites we link to, and anyone who want to add their site to this list also agree to the same". It used to be popular in music, programming and web development blogs, that much I remember, but I can't say how popular it was at large, the web and the internet was pretty much mostly a geeky thing at the time (around 2000s).

[jimjimjim]

uh, the webring idea is OLD. Not quite "And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge" old but close.

[rapnie]

"Master System ruled unchallenged, the key to breaking its power -- five microchips disguised as gold rings, carefully hidden away.", Rings of the Master by Jack L. Chalker

https://www.goodreads.com/series/41810-rings-of-the-master

[verandaguy]

Importantly, webrings are not known to allow their users to live unnaturally long lives, and webring-wraiths have never been observed hunting them.

[pverheggen]

A webring is a circular doubly linked list - to insert a new site, you only need two existing sites to update their links. It's decentralized and works with any tech stack, including editing a static HTML file.

It's a little silly if everyone is working off a centrally-maintained JSON file, you might as well turn it into a blogroll at that point.

[charcircuit]

>It's decentralized

But extremely fragile since if even one node in the network goes down the network is broken and if two go down then there will be sites no longer reachable from others. You want to know the other nodes in the network so you can deal with nodes that go down or leave the network.

[geon]

If those are concerns to you, you are not really the target audience.

[swiftcoder]

We could always build a DHT instead

[antonvs]

I think it's purely nostalgia from the early days of the web, from before search engines existed. The first webring came out in 1995! Over 30 years ago.

I think there was some sense of creating something to explore, where you didn't get to choose where to go next, there was more serendipity involved due to someone else's curation. No, it doesn't really make sense from a usability or practicality perspective, which is why despite OP, you don't really see them any more.

[dwd]

yes, the early days when the web was mostly decentralised and members of a community had their own individual sites.

[whynotisay]

Think more like "boxing ring" in that everything inside the circle is "in the ring".

The weird one is actually "rink" as in "skating rink" – because it derives from the word for "line".

So what you're talking about might actually be called a "web rink" if it existed, in that links flow in a linear fashion.

[antonvs]

No, the original webrings from 1995 were literally rings - each site linked to one other site in the ring, and eventually one of them would link back to the “first” site, making an actual ring.

[whynotisay]

Nope. There was no "first" site as you say - it was literally just a list of links.

The most innovative ones were iframes of a single source of links (iframes were all the rage, unless of course you clicked "no frames" as a user, because your internet was so slow).

But even the less formal ones simply listed links to other sites, there was no visit order, and definitely was not directional/circular.

It's "ring" like a boxing ring - as in "those within the ring" not a directional loop like you mention.

[antonvs]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring :

> To be a part of the webring, each site has a common navigation bar; it contains links to the previous and next sites. By selecting next (or previous) repeatedly, the user will eventually reach the site they started at; this is the origin of the term "webring."

But, it was a fundamentally silly structure for the web, so many sites implemented something beyond the ring structure, which is what you're describing. Technically, those weren't webrings in the above sense.

> It's "ring" like a boxing ring

Nice retcon, but wrong.

[Lalabadie]

> "Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Isn't it better to provide a list of links so users can choose where they want to go "next"?

That depends! If your goal is some optimal way of navigating, sure. But the shape of a webring means your site has two "neighbours", which is fun and uses spatial notions we don't see often anymore. It also means someone can remember Site Y as "the one next from Site X", which is also fun and creates more ways sites relate to each other. This relating to one another is usually the point of a webring.

[galaxyLogic]

THere is something to it I assume. Less is someties more/ COnstraints make it interesting, and challenging.

There is a modern-day similar thing. In MSN news-site the main news-article automatically steps though a loop. You can manually interfere, but the constraint is that you basically can see the news article only for a short time before it is replaced by another. I guess you could call it gamification as well. Thinks about Dunegeons and Dragons where you find news-articles in the dungeon and dragons are trying to burn them with their fiery blaze.

[account42]

Agreed, I never saw the point of having a group of sites like that instead each site just linking the other related/recommended sites - i.e. a web.

[tolerance]

Yeah. This is it. #RollsOverRings

[amazing_stories]

>"Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Ring is also a group of people, sometimes unified by a single purpose and lead by a "ringleader". That's the way webring is being used.

[scrame]

It's a web 1.0 thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

this was a popular one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ate_my_balls

Webrings kinda went away when "blogging" became the new thing, and then there were blogrolls and pingbacks and delicio.us and whathaveyou. That got supplanted by the larger glurge into social media with friendster, then myspaces top 8, and now everyone is just on facebook saying "what's the point?".

Indeed. As mentioned, its for personal sites as a lightweight way to share a link to a friends site that may or may not be related, rather than a list of affiliates or sponsors or whatever.

[globular-toast]

A ring can be extended by any single node without having to coordinate with everyone in the group.

[prmoustache]

I used to hate and ignore webrings back in the days.

However I usually spent times in the links section of every website I visited.

[q3k]

Kids these days...