Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
How you used to get people looking at your website before "going viral" was a thing, in the Web 1.0 days when people surfed the information superhighway by clicking on links to go from site to site.
1. The "Links" page! Every site had a page that was just links to other websites that the site owner thought were cool. You could email other site owners whose sites you thought were cool and ask if they thought your site was cool too, and they'd link back to you.
calcifer
@ifixcoinops @RadicalEdward and also the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) microformat ontology, which let you build a federated social network by just including some static data in your HTML pages.
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
2. Webrings! These were great. For a while every site was part of a webring. Say you ran gerbilzone.com and wanted traffic from other gerbil sites, you'd join the Gerbil Enthusiast Webring, and paste some code into your HTML and you'd have a banner that pointed to gerbilmadness.com, and visitors from thegerbilsite.net would see a link to gerbilzone and you could traverse the sites in the whole gerbil webring until you'd seen them all and looped back around to the start (hence "ring").
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Webrings let people interested in a site's topic browse through lots of other sites with the same topic to see what they had to say.
Obviously once you stumble into a webring you're going to spend a few hours happily browsing the ring, and that is NO GOOD FOR SEARCH ENGINES. They want you doing searches. So Yahoo bought Webring and killed it.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Second thing is google started off as a search engine that boosted sites based on how many links they had pointing back to them; google got so big that people set up "link farms" which were just spam websites that linked to legit sites (and eventually to other spam sites) and then google deranked links pages in like 2005. γ(γ)γ
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
(never mind for now the fact that many of the biggest sites started off as links pages and then just started screenshotting the websites they once linked to, so people would never leave the big sites)
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
You don't see many links pages anymore for a couple of reasons. The most horrible thing about the modern internet is that the biggest websites like facebook and reddit and twitter and such are run by jerks and they set the tone; these weirdos want you to stay on their one website all day long, even when there's nothing new to read, so they don't have links pages, so people aren't exposed to links pages as part of general internet culture.
Jeff Cliff
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
@clacke Aye, webring.com. Had an interface that made it easy for non-programmers, folks using Frontpage or Dreamweaver or whatever, to sign up and just copy/paste their code. Bought up by yahoo so they could destroy it.
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