Tedium - By Our Powers Combined … 🕸💍

Hey all, Ernie here with a refreshed piece about webrings. Sometimes it happens that you get really far on something (in my case with a piece on Linux and video game consoles, coming soon) and you want a little more time to generate the magic. That’s what happened here.

Today in Tedium: These days, social media tends to take a specific form—basically, you share content on a platform owned by someone else, who profits off your data and attention span. (No, this is not a piece about GDPR or anything like that. I. Promise.) The idea of a truly federated social network that brings together individuals but is unburdened by the big guy, is still relatively uncommon. (I’m on Mastodon, though. Are you?) Sites that do a good job of promoting the little guy are rare—StumbleUpon, for example, shut down in 2018. But there was once potential to be found in collaboration. Today’s Tedium talks webrings, the Captain Planet of the internet. — Ernie @ Tedium

Before we get going, be sure to check out or sponsor below:

You know what’d be meta? A webring about Lord of the Rings.

What the heck is a webring, and how does it work?

Something about the early web completely taken advantage of now is that in the pre-Google days, search kind of sucked.

Sure, you could find websites through services like Lycos or Excite, but the engines varied wildly in quality and didn’t lend themselves to a certain kind of serendipitous discovery that is slightly easier to find online nowadays.

To put it another way, businesses were quickly trying to commercialize the web, but the individual user still had room to stand out.

And it’s with that spirit in mind that networks of users decided to self-organize their pages through lightly-organized “rings” that would lead users to pages on a similar topic. Having a link somewhere on your site that ensured users that your page was a way station in a series of pages on a similar theme.

Structurally, a webring has many parallels to the modern-day Twitter quote-tweet chain, a Russian nesting doll of sorts in which you’re encouraged to keep clicking on the tweets being quoted, with no end in sight. Depending on what you’re up to at the time, it’s a novel, entertaining, somewhat curated experience.

But while the webring in its purest form was interesting and effective, it was difficult to maintain—a problem that, in 1995, an enterprising teenager named Sage Weil attempted to solve. He expanded on the basic idea that drove Denis Howe’s EUROPa experiment.

“Obviously, this is something that anyone simply by getting together with a few other people and having each person add a link to their page pointing to the next person in the loop,” Weil explained on his website in 1996. “However, when somebody wants to join the ring, someone has to edit their page to point to the new page and—when the ring gets big enough—it becomes more and more difficult to keep the ring ‘intact’ when pages go down.”

An early version of Webring.org.

Weil, still in high school at the point he launched Webring.org in 1995, made the webring easier to maintain and track through a CGI script, solving the problem of what to do when there’s a dead link.

Weil’s basic idea was trendy in the late ’90s, and became a frequent subject of newspaper articles, that frequently spoke with deep reverence of the way that the rings improved the digital experience.

“If using a search engine can be like drinking from a fire hose, Internet surfing using a Web ring is like sharing a cup of tea with a group of strangers who are batty about a favorite hobby, like collecting Australian emergency-squad insignia,” New York Times writer Tina Kelley wrote of the phenomenon in 1999.

(It also helped the concept of the webring was complex enough it lent itself to further explanation.)

And Webring.org was the most prominent of a few websites that rode this wave. Initially, the site was a ramshackle, commercial-free resource in which Weil directly shared his trials and tribulations with his audience.

Among them: Some company tried to claim it held the legal right to the name Ring, and was harassing individual webrings, though the battle was eventually resolved after a lawyer assisting Weil pointed out the number of uses of the word ring that predated the internet.

Eventually, though, the site eventually was sold off multiple times. First, a company called Starseed bought it and got Weil away from the daily grind of keeping the server online. Then, in 1998, GeoCities bought it—which made sense because webrings included many GeoCities sites—and made few changes. Then Yahoo bought GeoCities a year after that and did that thing Yahoo always does—they tried to remake the idea in its own image, ruining it in the process.

Unlike most of those situations, however, Yahoo relented and gave up ownership of the site after users complained about Yahoo’s changes.

WebRing.com only fell off the internet somewhat recently (between the time I wrote this piece and it was updated; the Internet Archive stopped tracking it in February of this year), but we had it for quite a long time—nearly a quarter century.

To make Wikipedia a success, Bomis—and, in a way, the webring—was sacrificed

Despite the lad-mag reputation it carried, Bomis had a higher mission at its core. It was one spelled out in a 10th-anniversary message posted on its website:

Bomis was founded in 1996. Since then it has served as a sort of laboratory for experimenting with new ideas about the modeling of information, about new systems of online community and collaboration. This laboratory has given birth to many crazy-seeming ideas. Most of these failed more or less immediately. Some of them showed promise, and then failed. A few proved to have some lasting merit. All of them provided useful insights.

One of those ideas with some lasting merit was Wikipedia, the user-editable online encyclopedia that came to life as a Bomis skunkworks project in 2001. Nupedia, the predecessor of Wikipedia, struggled to make headway because of the complex peer-review process that drove it. The internet works too fast for peer review, so they got rid of it.

Bomis, which made its money from advertising, played a fundamental role in the creation of Wikipedia, with Wales effectively using profits from the webring site to bankroll the endeavor, which initially started out as the non-user-editable Nupedia. Larry Sanger, a Bomis employee, was put in charge of Nupedia and later Wikipedia, though he had effectively left these roles before Wikipedia became a mainstream phenomenon.

But Bomis’ declining fortunes could not keep up with Wikipedia’s stunning growth, and eventually, the decision was made to take Wikipedia nonprofit, a move that, in the long run, proved brilliant.

In some ways, Wikipedia’s success as a concept benefited from the same feedback-loop dynamics that a webring does. It’s a site that rewards clicking, and becomes more valuable the further down the rabbit hole you go. It becomes like a game, almost. That, in its own way, is a dynamic that Wikipedia borrowed from Bomis and other webring-driven networks.

The only thing lost in this process of making Wikipedia a trusted source, unfortunately, is the decentralization. There’s a reason why Wikipedia is one of the largest sites on the internet, and it’s because it took the internet’s collective knowledge and put it under one roof, a culmination of the “ideas about the modeling of information” that Bomis was built upon.

In a way, it was a worthy sacrifice of the open web. What Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and company had built was more fundamental than the webring.