Webrings

Getting off Twitter I decided to simply follow all the blogs of people I followed on there. It was a bit of work. Most people do not blog regularly, but overall my feed reader sees more content than ever. I would appreciate having webrings back. I would prefer more content being posted to blogs instead of 700 toots. I would love more of the „goofy personal sites“ we hosted on Tripod and Geocities.

But that’s me. And it feels like times changed. Websites seem to have a purpose. Self promotion, promoting a product or a company, building brand, gaining domain authority,… there are many purposes now, but „OMG I love Justin Timberlake“ is not one of them. (This also seems to be how many people use social media, but that is a different topic.)

This is not necessarily good or bad. Instead of webrings we have link aggregators. They do a pretty good job if you are looking for tech content in general or specific technologies. But the further you leave this niche the less likely it seems to be to find a link aggregator. Without searching a lot, try to find one where people link their reviews of recent book releases so you have some idea what to read next.

What link aggregators lack cannot compete with are personal recommendations. The signal to noise ratio just got too high. I do not want to dig through 30 LLM generated articles why LLMs are basically AGI and the future before finding the one post how someone wrote their own http server in brainfuck just for fun.

So the best I can do right now is adding more blogs to my feed reader. If you happen to have a blog - and have an RSS feed which also does not seem to be the standard anymore - please let me know. I would be happy to add you and see what you have to say. Even if you only post once a year or less, rest assured I usually do not clean up my feed list and will see your posts.

>> posted on Nov. 15, 2023, 7:21 p.m. in web