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.

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

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.

Yeah. This is it. #RollsOverRings

>"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Kids these days...

It's the left and right arrows on the homepage. There's two rings.

> Not everything needs to be about making money

I feel like this is what keeps ruining things, in almost any hobby/sector/ecosystem I come across. Initially, as the only people interested in the thing is doing the thing because it's fun and interesting, everything works out great, people helping people because helping people is fun and the thing is fun.

After a while, somehow it starts to bring in money for some people, others start to see people earning money and then the money-optimizers eventually arrive, sucking all the fun out of the ecosystem since all they care about is money, money and money, and tons of more money-optimizers arrive after the initial batch made their success, and around we go until it's all commercial slop all over the place that drowns out all the authentic stuff that initially was almost everything in the community.

Seemingly non-profit groups with events held in actual venues where you can face-to-face show your disgust towards these people seem to be the only way of having communities that last for decades around a fun and interesting thing, anything online seems to fall victim to the above way too quickly.

I’ve been reading optimistic things like this on HN for long years now, but the world keeps moving in the opposite direction. Your post doesn’t confront the fact that the vast majority of people interested in your passions, stories, or art no longer follow third-party websites. Younger generations have grown up with the phone as default device, and they use it in a way that discourages discovery outside of social media or other for-profit apps.

In the early millennium, blogging was of course a niche interest, but one could still commonly meet people IRL who followed the same blogs; they were part of a real-life feeling of community. Blogs about local politics, religious denominations, or music-band fandom gained enough readers from those audiences to cause real-world consequences. When people are nostalgic about blogging, it’s also about blogging having been something that mattered societally.

This comment is such an elegant Rorschach test. Bravo.

Back in the days, the webring idea wasn’t driven by popularity groups and metrics but by affinity, from the perspective of authors.

A ring was thematic, friends, interest.

Which site has no next button? I think some of them hide them put them in menus!

Yeah seems overkill. Back in the day (1990s) you'd use a serverless script in the "Personal HomePage" language.

These days you could do this in client side JS, mayhe fetch the static list from a Gitgub blob or one of the sites in the group.

This should be just a static page… Cloudflare pages are perfect for this. All updating could be done in the repo by special scripts from MD or some other files.

Why not. It's easy.

In this case it would be “you might be interested in this <thing> if you have an unexamined and irrational hankering for pointless mid-1990s web tech.”

Agreed. There should be a subset of Betteridge's law: if a headline states that you need to do something, you don't.