What ever happened to webrings? (2015)
hover.blog
hover.blog
> Webring.org was purchased by an investment firm in 1997
We were not an investment firm - We were a scrappy startup that was housed in the same city as Sage and got to know him (as well as many other techies in the community) and had the opportunity to purchase WebRing from him at a time when he was ready pursue other interests.
Webring.com gets it more correct:
> In 1997, Weil sold WebRing to Starseed, Inc.
WebRing was awesome for its time - I personally did a lot to speed up the system that we purchased from Sage to help it keep scaling to the point where we could get acquired.
Tim Killeen, eventual owner of WebRing after Yahoo left it to die, did some great additions to the technology to help keep it relevant for several more years.
There's been a lot of discussions of small personal sites coming back into vogue recently - This gives me hope that something like WebRing could find value in the community again.
/side note:
I was onsite at GeoCities working to integrate WebRing into their system.
Literally, on my final day onsite and the when were to demo the integration, the company all-hands announcing the sale to Yahoo happened.
Exciting times !
I'm honestly not sure why the current webring.com has a history section on it since the site doesn't appear to anything else useful.
Just occurred to me that, if you were designing this today, you wouldn't choose "webring.com" ...
It would be Ringz.io, or wbr.ng or Loop.ly or somesuch :)
Today the web doesn't feel like a web, it feels like there's a few large social media hubs that point to every other website, and those sites only point one of two places: to themselves or to an Amazon affiliate link. Years ago I remember getting frustrated on some news site because all their hyperlinks just linked to other barely-relevant articles on their website. I didn't understand at the time what they were doing.
If you have a personal website, consider adding a page with links to your favorite sites. Search engines just don't capture that type of browsing.
I don't advocate for their content but the way they've built things is pretty great.
I've described it as "the 1998 web with better cgi scripts".
Also search engines like marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu) and teclis (https://teclis.com/) are nice - they essentially filter out pages with advertisements and trackers which is a pretty brilliant way to defeat SEO farms and other low quality content with ulterior motives.
To see their effectiveness give it a challenge. Try queries like "how to lose weight" or heck, "lasagna recipe".
To demonstrate, I just took the time to make two videos for "lasagna recipe" with the network tab of chrome's inspector window open:
google's first result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntC5ZcgxyD4
teclis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GULoL8o6NDA
Along with recipe sites, there's recently been a crop of similar looking tech help sites that basically give w3schools level answers with a bunch of rotating ads based on the hypothesis that users will look at the content, then focus on their work for the next hour or two, keeping the tab open because that's just the common pattern while the ad rotations go on the page.
As far as serving ads go, programming and recipe sites exhibit similar usage patterns. Similar to recipe sites, the answers you came for are interleaved with ads in the hope that people drag their cursor over the banner ad while selecting text from the site or at least keep that part in the viewport open for the duration of the activity. What a lovely feature!
Search has to be driven by axioms of values and purpose because different intents yield different results. There is no silver bullet.
For example, google, bing and yandex's goals are pretty antithetical to mine unless I'm actively trying to buy something. On google, I came for a lasagna recipe and someone tried to sell me car parts and a home mortgage which is fine. Those engines are just a poorly chosen tool for that job.
There's a new flood of people who don't mind mixing violence with their politics, hate groups, and a few fascinating libraries that are vast archives of incendiary frauds, quacks and malicious propagandists of the past.
Many countries free speech rules are more restrictive than the United States when it comes to hate speech and calls for violence and insurrection.
I've been meaning to scrape those archives and email academic historians with a Dropbox link. Historical hateful screeds and conspiratorial fabrications are actually hard to come by (think of say, political opportunists trying to capitalize on the 1932 Bonus March with self serving conspiracies).
It's a long list of mostly self-published pamphlets, newsletters and books. When these mountebanks pass on since they were never actually affiliated with legitimate institutions, their papers don't get cared for.
This also goes back to the search problem. GBY explicitly excludes the most virulent and harmful of this material. Fine. Agreed. Totally legitimate. But there's no way to say "I'm interested in folklore and sociology, I know it's all fiction".
People take action, sometimes murderous, based on these fraudsters. For the purpose of crafting policy, laws, and documenting manipulation techniques for media literacy, there should be a quarantined place where their lies go instead of being intentionally scrubbed after it manifests some awful tragedy. Maybe that would be a good candidate for a separate search tool.
There's some decent ML work with NLP there since (1) many things are anti-semitic dog-whistles (such as Alex Jones using the term Globalist) and would probably cluster really nicely with the quiet part using seq2seq, word2vec and might even be achievable unsupervised, and (2) many of them are just crude copy/paste amalgamations from older hate sheets, like the protocols, secret world government by spiridovich or waters flowing eastward by fry; oftentimes with merely the names and events updated to be more contemporary while usually throwing a different oppressed group under the bus such as immigrants or trans people. In the results you could display this: "See side by side comparison with this literature from the British Union of Fascists" where you clearly demonstrate some "truth about gays" is just a crude find and replace of say "truth about jews" from 1935.
It might also be helpful to assuage the victims who are falling into these libelous traps by clearly demonstrating how obvious the fakery is. Of course some seem to lack the cognitive wherewithal regardless of the clarity of the evidence but we might as well give it a go.
People started to think about linking as a way of "losing" Pagerank.
Stuffing keywords.
And the worst of all, content length. People started writing long articles to keep the Search God happy, most of the times with little added value and a diluted information density, making readers lose time to keep the Gods happy.
Then social networks took over and it was even worse. Most people ditched their own sites or never started one, a friend who is a photographer lost his FB/Instagram accounts a couple of days ago and now understands what I was talking about when I told him he should have some content in a domain he controls.
Instagram doesn't even allow more than one link.
I used one about 15 years ago to help promote an ASCII Art app I wrote (I'm still a member too). I just checked and the webring still exists (http://artcode.org/ascii/index.php). Many of the sites that were members are now gone, but some of them still exist. Kind of cool that it's still around, it's a nice look into the past.
Actually, he wrote it himself to support static websites.[1]
Naturally.
> If the words GeoCities, Excite or Alta Vista mean anything to you, then chances are that the word ‘webring’ triggers a sudden pang of nostalgia.
but cannot help hear a voice from 2032, saying;
"If the words Like, Follow, and Tweet mean anything to you, then
chances are that the words "Social Media" triggers a sudden pang of
nostalgia."
I feel confident you could have used a more accurate word that doesn't make it sound like you're trying to flex your vocabulary. HN in a nutshell I suppose.
How do you know the OP’s thoughts to believe you have a more accurate word to convey them?
Parochial perfectly conveys the combination of ignorance, narrow perspective and pettiness. What would you use with the same meaning?
I'm assuming "parochialism" is what you have an issue with, but I'm struggling to think of what else sounds better and conveys the same meaning.
https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/parochial <--- those are all pretty crap
Further, one acquaintance has built a search engine specifically for web rings: https://github.com/cblgh/lieu
It was something short like bla404.something can't remember so I can't search archive for it either... but since speedway isn't there I think this was before archive existed.
Anyhow the point is; those "blogs" or home made diaries where incredible, pseudonymous before people realized that what you say on the internet can be stored forever so people really REALLY said the truth and I couldn't stop reading.
About relationships, funny tidbits and absurdities of life all mixed in the most honest and open communication I have ever witnessed, all made from scratch (html and pictures only at that time no .css an very little to no .js) AND designed from scratch AND self hosted!
To go back there you need some sort of cryptographic solution that ensures you can hide forever but even then the sort of information you are prepared to share now is not the same as back then when nobody knew/understood what privacy problems an indefinitely copyable/storable/shareable world brings.
It's lost in time, like tears in rain.
Odd but I felt like people were more aware during that era that what you said might never go away, but were perhaps emboldened by the default pseudonymous state of the web at the time. I remember being taught in school to use no personal information when setting up accounts and my classmates largely following that doctrine. Facebook's real name policy seemed bizarre to me but the world had kind of changed by then.
So that means the real value has to move into the digital world which is fragile = the hardware breaks and since it's connected you can get hacked without recourse!
Back then digital was just for fun, now it's serious. I don't know where you grew up and which level of paranoia the people around you had?
That said, you should probably be more scared about the future, than the past; only one way around it: Take responsability and prepare:
- Own your connection.
- Own your hardware.
- Own your software.
- Own your time.
But a simple Raspberry 4 on battery backup (on the fiber router too) with dynamic DNS; can actually feed you, maybe not today but very soon when AWS and co. start raising prices! It's not a question of if, but when.
The good news is that it’s just as easy today to make those simple websites.
but most of the people building wix or squarespace (or whatever all the youtuber and podcasters are promoting this week), they don't have that knowledge and don't necessarily want to learn it. easier for you doesn't mean easier for everybody.
Many ISPs included personal web hosting with their internet access service at the time as well, which usually did require a slightly higher level of knowledge, but not that high. Netscape had a point and click page editor by 1997.
$EDITOR index.htmlThat's how I wrote my homepage
Your home page clearly uses CSS and judging by how it jerks around when I scroll there is plenty of JS too.
where did they claim they didnt use CSS? CSS can be handwritten too.
> and judging by how it jerks around when I scroll there is plenty of JS too.
Maybe be less judgemental and more looking at facts then, because there isn't.
The page linked in response is mostly CSS, and (I just went to a laptops to check) the first few lines are javascript google tags.
I think the original point was supposed to be that websites used to be just content wrapped in some simple HTML, which was easy to learn. But now the level of complexity is higher and so is the barrier to entry. I agree with this point.
So when someone replied saying “what’s stopping you from [building simple HTML sites] in 2022, thats what I did”, I was confused to see a site that included JS and was mostly CSS. Because it was seemingly trying to contradict a point about no CSS and JS. Honestly it feels like spam.
Its tangental, but I agree the source seems hand written and seems to have a well done minimalist approach, which is respectable. I regret the negative tone to my original response.
> The page linked in response [...]
The page was not linked in response. It was a sibling comment.
It does use CSS, but most of it is inline. $EDITOR index.html, as you say :)
judging by how it jerks around when I scroll there is plenty of JS too.
There's no JS save GA, but I appreciate the heads up.
If you could give details on what setup you saw jerky scrolling on - screen size, OS, browser, zoom level - I'd be much obliged.
What was nice is that more thought went into it, since it was basically a blank canvas. There also was a focus on quality over quantity - your website was something you continually grew and improved. Modern content is something you churn out and forget about immediately after.
But as easier options became available, those sites disappeared. First blogs came along, which were more structured. And modern social media is even more structured as well. We went from a single blank canvas you could spend hours tinkering with to a coloring book page you're given for sixty seconds before it gets thrown away and you're given the next one.
Webrings were like the 8-track tape of the internet.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150915200650/http://dir.webring... - oh, that looks neat... but then following to its current version, it appears to be bought by some other company and then left to rot (no content there).
And then...
> Or better yet, check out Hover’s very own collection of random old websites, Retro Site Ninja!
http://web.archive.org/web/20150916233518/http://retrosite.n...
That looks neat...
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: retrosite.ninja
Please don't post archive.org links unless there's really no alternative.
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
Sounds great, and I imagine they were useful for the 90's web to jump from one Star Wars fansite to the next (which would have been much harder to find otherwise), but frankly, I didn't feel a great desire to see them now. I guess that mode of browsing is simply not how I use the web nowadays, nor I imagine many other people.
What we might need are modern web rings - an easy to setup software that is plug in play for anyone who sets up a simple site - and that then can be configured to point to other sites. Maybe with a universal login for that "ring"
Maybe one could argue that link aggregators like HN are sort of a spiritual successor to the webring concept? You also go from one interesting site to the next, but you also have a social aspect, which makes it a lot more fun. The centralization is still quite strong, though. Just wondering whether you could keep the social element but make it more of a 'pull' thing, like webrings were, than a 'push' from a central site like HN.
Webrings were a form of social network and modern centralized social networks with media capabilities ate them.
MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Digg, Reddit and all the rest - they depopulated webrings, which drastically reduced the value in the network rings.
People have N time in the day to post content. They chose the easier, heavily networked publishing systems to use.
Of course this depends on trustworthy people who are willing to take on the effort to become a “ringmaster” of their community and approve new entries. There could even be webrings that connect great related webrings, forming a decentralized network of rings – a web of value and meaning rather than commerce and data aggregation.
But I guess our browsing habits have changed too much and it has become rare that we discover great websites outside of the realm of anonymous content-machines. Most people wouldn’t even see any of those rings or would ignore them and instead google for similar websites, even if they find only a bunch of crap between ads.
Maybe there's a swing back in that direction with the "fediverse"?
Not on my personal website, but I did started some sorta linking/collecting/diary-ing thingy at our family website https://notes.oinam.com (very rough around the edges, lots of broken links, yet to even have a pattern to start tidying up).
I think it was probably doomed by sites not wanting outbound links, either because of pagerank, fear of loosing traffic, looking unprofessional, or the appearance of an affiliation. The inbound traffic was not worth the outbound traffic.
There were various scripts created for managing such issues but it didn't seem worth the hassle so I ended up letting the rings decay until eventually pulling the plug when leaving for grad school.
Did webrings have more features than just the list of sites, like voting and stuff? I honestly don't remember.
> A webring offered a free and decentralized experience
Which is it lol? Decentralized or owned and managed by a single domain?
I remember my first moments on the web, 1995 or 1996. There was a website, it might have even been disinfo.org, and it had really weird shenanigans like forums for people who (believe they) had been kidnapped by UFOs. I thought it was great! But the second time I logged in, I couldn't find it. So I wrote a nice email to Yahoo asking if they had removed it from their listings, and somebody at Yahoo responded almost immediately with the URL, like this was a normal thing to do. I think about that sometimes, when thinking about the early days of the web.
I was definitely surprised to see an active web ring.
FTFY.