WebRings: The Lost Neighborhoods of the Internet
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WebRings: The Lost Neighborhoods of the Internet
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About this listen
Before Google dominated search, digital pioneers built an interconnected web of communities that changed how we discovered content online. In this episode of Lost On the Internet, we explore WebRings - the forgotten network that turned the early internet into a series of digital neighborhoods.
Created by a 17-year-old coder in his bedroom, WebRings grew from a way to connect anime fan sites into a $25 million Yahoo acquisition. But money wasn't what made WebRings special - it was the countless underground communities they spawned, from hacker collectives to underground music scenes, all connected by those iconic "Previous | Next | Random" navigation buttons.
We'll dive into the cyberpunk reality of surfing these rings, where you could stumble from a death metal fan site into a conspiracy theory hub, then into a home-brew computing forum - all curated by real people, not algorithms. Learn how these digital neighborhoods fostered some of the first online communities, and why their disappearance marked the end of a more democratic internet.