Let's bring back the webring.
replyThe no ai webring is full of really unique stuff. There’s definitively people out there still doing webrings. Now we need a metawebring.
replySlop sucks and all, but those abandoned "let's make pages look like geocities" sites are pretty tiresome.
replyBecause you don't find them visually interesting or because of their content?
replyThere's a whole world of modern unindexed handcoded html + light js sites that really hearken back to the mid-90s web, and they're often part of webrings.
As someone who wasn't around in their true heyday I'm all for it.
replyI joined a web ring last year, but I'm uncertain about it. Modern web rings tend to automate updates to the next/prev buttons, so I'm never sure what I'm linking to. The web ring owner acts as curator, but I don't know how much effort they put in to keep slop or other undesirable content out.
replyI'm part of one and I don't think it really promotes discoverability. What could work would be some kind of search engine restricted to said webring to make a button to list similar articles. At least I would click on such a button!
replyIt was tried before (e.g. Dmoz) and it does not work after it becomes popular.
replyI'm thinking more like just taking all the text files from 80-90s and making a separate static, frozen in time internet.
Dmoz was trying to replicate the Yahoo! style of directory, which requires being comprehensive.
replyToday we don't need comprehensive, we need maximum signal and minimum noise.
If you're not trying to be comprehensive it's not a real directory, it's just an ordinary "awesome-list".
replywould you call HN just "an awesome list"?
replyI'd like to argue that Wikipedia also tries to be comprehensive within the limits of relevant topics. And overall, Wikipedia still seems to be going strong.
replyI'd argue that Wikipedia and its 'sister' projects have accidentally cannibalized a sizeable fraction of the former 'non-commercial, non-business focused' Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s. If you're providing information in a way that's not intended to further some sort of profit motive, it makes sense to work within that large established project because that maximizes the resulting exposure. The rise of LLMs only makes this starker, every LLM is trained from Wikipedia.
reply> Wikipedia [..] have [..] cannibalized a sizeable fraction of the former 'non-commercial, non-business focused' Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s
replyInteresting take. Do you mean Wikipedia has cannibalized the traffic to these web sites or do you mean that Wikipedia lead to these web sites going offline altogether?
Yup. Search engines will basically be dead. Anything you’d type into a search engine you will probably prompt from an LLM instead.
replyBut hand curated human directories should in theory have a very high signal to noise ratio. Every link should take you to a quality site.
Hear! Hear!
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