Long ago when the Internet and its websites were still campy versus professional, there were webrings. I miss webrings. Sure, they are still around but it’s not the same. Webrings are just one more dinosaur leftover, not quite retro yet.

I’m not sure why they began to die off as a species. You can still find a few in weblogs, less often all the time. Nothing else is quite the same as a webring so I wouldn’t say they were replaced exactly. I think a combination of networks (like MySpace and LiveJournal) and the trouble with spam defeated the once mighty webring. Networks with so many groups of people didn’t need an outside way to gather people in interest groups. They were set up for that very thing, building web communities. Webrings became too much work to maintain as the sites submitted were less often personal sites and more often business sites looking for shameless free promotion whereever they could find it.

I’m not sure just what happened to bring the webring so low. Those are just my theories. I do miss the old campy days of the Internet with webrings, personal sites designed in really basic HTML, ASCII art email signatures, newsgroups before the spam floods, IRC and having adult content be a much bigger problem than spam. Keep the campiness alive, don’t be too professional, get a webring while they’re still around.

[tags]webring, retro, campy[/tags]