Discussion summary
Discussion about implementing a web ring using modern tools like Cloudflare Workers or static pages. Some prefer simple, static solutions, while others consider serverless scripts or client-side options.
What the discussion says
- Some advocate for a static page approach with scripts managed via GitHub.
- Others see serverless or client-side scripts as viable options.
- There is nostalgia and interest in reviving webrings.
- Concerns about overcomplication or overkill for simple solutions.
“Using a Cloudflare Worker to implement a web 0.9 feature”
“Back in the day (1990s) you'd use a serverless script in the 'Personal HomePage' language.”
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- Hacker News
- In a webring, do you usually always have the same fixed webring neighbours?
Back in the days, how did it usually work about this : If your neighbour has only 7 visitor/day but you do have 100/day, can you ask to change and have this other 10000 visitor/day-site as neighbour?
As a webring admin, how do you manage these member requests?
by josephernest - 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.
by Juliate - Back in 2011, Yahoo’s obsession with gaining control of all webrings basically led to their downfall under Marissa Mayer.by deadbabe
- The what and how parts are good but "why webring?" needs to be explained more.
If the content is summarized and personalized for the user the search engine is already rendering similar pages.
by chopete3 - This comment is such an elegant Rorschach test. Bravo.by rhet0rica
- > "By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful."
Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.
by techcode - This is what will keep the web more human as we go forward into AI slop commercial web crap. Hand build your sites, talk about things your passionate about, share stories, art, things you make. And the web-ring connects you too others in the community with things you share similar interests in. This is what the web was for. Not everything needs to be about making moneyby ravetcofx
- 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.
by TFNA - > 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 recently added Wander to a website of mine (https://www.heyhomepage.com/wander/). Before that, I became a proud member of the small Tech Makers webring (at the bottom of https://www.theredpanther.org/).
Even before that, I just implemented a blogroll (or list of shared links, as I prefer to call it) at https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&link=1&view=sha... Maybe your blog is also in it!? I manually picked most of the bookmarks/feeds I follow from HN.
The basis of all these rolls, lists and rings are - of course - hyperlinks. RSS and OPML are silently working in the background. I think there's still unfulfilled potential for RSS as a replacement for social media, because the open web is already social media.
by rambambram - I prefer opening: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs
The main idea being that you don't actually need to coordinate a real ring of links to easily link to posts on other blogs that you like.
by lwhsiao - Am I missing something? The person advocates for something that they don't use? I likely don't understand the idea behind it because I was expecting to see links to other pages on that page.by dr_kretyn
- It's the left and right arrows on the homepage. There's two rings.by misingnoglic
- In case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/by ajxs
- I have no friends.
Anyone else have a nerdy blog they want to ring me in? I'll point to the next one.
(engineersneedart.com)
by JKCalhoun - 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".
by galaxyLogic - Yeah. This is it. #RollsOverRingsby tolerance
- 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.by account42
- > "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.
by Lalabadie - 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.
by whynotisay - 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.
by antonvs - 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.
by pverheggen - 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.
- 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.
by verandaguy