anon, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.

Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to other like-minded sites, typically in quid-pro-quo manner (I link to you, you link back to me), or to a manually-curated directory of like-minded sites.

This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.

Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.