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Hit 500 visited webrings last week and it got me thinking about curation vs discovery
So I've been tracking my old-school web browsing for fun and somehow crossed 500 webrings over the past 3 years. On one hand, webrings were this amazing human-curated way to find hidden gems, like that Star Wars fan page that still has a guestbook from 1997. On the other, they could lead you down endless rabbit holes of dead links and half-broken frames. Did webrings make discovery better than today's algorithm feeds, or were they just slow and clunky? I'm leaning toward the curation angle but curious what you all think.
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andrew711d ago
Tbh you could train them a bit by emailing the ringmaster to request different topics.
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Gotta disagree a bit here. I spent way too many hours clicking through webrings that promised "cool sci-fi sites" only to land on someone's Geocities shrine to Babylon 5 that hadn't been updated since 1999. The curation was only as good as whoever ran that ring, which was usually one person with very specific tastes. At least with algorithm feeds I can train them over time to stop showing me stuff I don't care about. You couldn't train a webring to suddenly show you more indie game reviews instead of bad Trek fan fiction.
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