Webring - Another One Bites The Dust

imrdkl writes: "Salon is running an feature about the history of the WebRing since Yahoo! bought it last September. The article goes on to give an outlook on Yahoo! itself, including how WebRing has recently been sold to one of the original developers. Webring seemed to me to be a really nice neighborly concept, but it seems at least some of the ringmasters reckon it should die now."

Comments

Webring "communities"?

[hingleton]

Did the concept of webrings ever really generate anything though?

Remember the last time you noticed a link to a webring'd site - you were probably on that site due to Google, and you were there because you wanted a specific piece of information.

Information found - close the window.
Information not found - hit back and try the next search result down.

Any online "communities" are usually formed by a group of people who know each other (at least to a minor degree), and not by the "next link on this webring."

Salon anyone?

[gkbarr]

Is it my imagination, or has /. become the office link to all things Salon? Pretty redundant for those of us who read Salon on a regular basis to see all of their stories posted here too.

I remember...

[PlaysWithMatches]

... when webrings were pretty big, a few years back. Every page you went to on any subject seemed to have a "This site is a member of such-and-such ring" box on it somewhere. I even joined a webring myself, back when I had a web site about the Euphoria programming language.

But almost as quickly as webrings became popular, they (for the most part) vanished once again. I think there are three major reasons for this:

1. Most webrings were poorly maintained, at best, and filled with broken links.
2. Sites like Google, the Netscape "What's Related" menu, etc. made webrings obsolete. Why bother with a webring when your favorite search engine had a feature to show you related pages, and most browsers had this built in?
3. Why the hell do we need 50 Linux webrings?! "Linux Users," "Linux Lovers," "The *Official* Linux Webring," "The Unofficial Linux Webring" ... sheesh!

Those reasons and a myriad of lesser ones are what contributed to the death of webrings, if you ask me. Kind of a shame, but honestly I (as a web surfer and as a webmaster) never found much use for webrings beyond the fact that it was kinda cool to be part of a "group."

Re:I remember...

[evand]

I think the major problem with webrings is that they weren't useful. I very rarely used them for navigation; even if I was interested in Topic X, who says that the Next Site on Topic X's webring would be any good?

In general, if I was interested enough in the genre of site to be on a site regarding it long enough to see the "Member of Topic X Webring" navigation item, I probably knew most of the good sites anyway.

Re:I remember...

[Tony.Tang]

I agree with this post. The utility of the webring was quite low, and has been made even less useful of late.

One of the reasons may be that "back in the day", the ratio of "good sites on a topic" to "how easy it is to find them" was quite low. Today, the ratio is a lot higher -- it's easier to find more sites on a given topic both because there's more of them (chaos breeds goodness), and because there's a lot more investment into things on the web (consider news sites, for example).

I was involved in a few webrings back in the day, but like the original poster said, it was more of a "belonging" thing than anything else. Being in a webring meant being in a community. One of the big ones of the day was diary-l (I don't know what happened to it). The webring also had a mailing-list -- and it was folks in the mailing-list that probably had the best time -- after all, that encouraged more interaction than anything else, and made people feel part of a group.

It was an interesting social phenomenon, I think. In a place where there was considerably less social interaction, webrings came to be to try to bring some order to the chaos, and make people feel like they were part of a community. It was, of course, essentially an illusion (or a clickable link, at best), and I think webrings were one illusion that became evident by virtue of their being useless.

Re:so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>IRC is still alive and well.

>But the average web surfer doesn't know what IRC is.

Hmmm, could there be a connection here ?

Re:Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[shrdlu]

What Yahoo! does makes a lot of business sense. However they are forsaking a large amount of goodwill as they acquire and corrupt various sites that used to be very nice resources. Alas, that is the way of the capitalist. I can't say I'll feel sorry when it comes back and bites them later.

I still have a rocketmail account. I really miss rocketmail, which is one of the many things that yahoo swallowed. I think that they were interested more in acquiring the 411 database that came with rocketmail, than actually keeping most of the other services that came with it. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I wish that it was a little easier to leave a few little corners of ingenuity alone. Rocketmail, Geocities, 411, Webring...

I almost never read that account, but it's nice that it's still there. Guess I should be grateful that it didn't get thrown out along with everything else. Yahoo used to be a couple of fun guys in a trailer on campus. Times sure have changed.

Re:Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[archen]

, but I wish that it was a little easier to leave a few little corners of ingenuity alone

I think in years to come we're going to look back on many different ideas which were very good but never made it. Why? Because they got swallowed up, the big company didn't know what to do with it, and eventually it became a casualty of a budget cut/lack of interest by the big corperation. It's sort of sad to think of how my internet experience a few years ago was defined by fairly innovative ideas that were doing pretty good, and now most of them have been taken over and either killed or corrupted beyond redemption. WBS really comes to mind as the only chat room I've ever been able to tolerate, and that was killed not so long ago (taken over by Infoseek alliance or whatever). Even slashdot itself might end up in this category eventually...

Re:Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[hearingaid]

GeoCities bought Webring, not Yahoo. Yahoo bought GeoCities some months later, and ended up getting Webring basically by accident.

This is entirely correct. I remember feeling nervous when Webring got swallowed up by the vastly more commercial GC.

The integration was killed quickly and quietly when it became apparent that they had nothing going for them but some half-assed Perl scripts.

WebRing didn't need very much, really. It worked, and worked pretty well. It let ringmasters set up the rings pretty much the way they wanted to: good rings were useful, bad rings were not. Post Yahoo! the rings became much, much less useful, as the Yahoo-borg attempted to corrupt all webrings with its user interface.

Now, I like the Yahoo! UI for a general search directory, but man, it sucks as a page design element. Straightjacketing.

And then I can go on about how All Ring Members Must Now Have a Yahoo! ID Instead of Just an Email Address... bah.