Ah man, those times were great. Bored? Just push the button and you'll see something new. No scrolling, just a new website with random interesting stuff to explore.

Stumbleupon was great. I remember having a browser plug in for it. Then I stopped using it for a little while and never went back to it.

Does it still exist?

@bobdobberson @mrpalmer16 omg YES stumbleupon was incredible! I've asked around if people remember this and it seems that not a ton of people were on there.

It will happen out of necessity once LLMs make search engines useless. Bookmarks and human-curated content will be the only way to find stuff.

It's already affecting small businesses worldwide, who aren't being discovered anymore by searches in their local area.

So would people having webpages instead of social media accounts

And there's your problem... (in the voice of Jamie Hyneman, Mythbusters). To see a real return of webrings, people would need to have (make) their own pages and curate some links.

Thinking about it, with the rise of selfhosted, it's actually really viable, cobble together a docker stack with a WYSIWYG HTML editor somewhat oriented to the task (pretty sure something out there can be repurposed), a web server, proxy, and that's about it (probably missing a fair bit, not my bailiwick, still, once the stack is made and solid, I'm guessing many would host, I would). Set a threshold of how many people you're willing to host, say 50 or whatever so you're able to check for CSAM or other legal minefields, and Bob's your uncle, stir in some solid security to keep it isolated if you're using it at home (or VPS) and it's golden.

OK, more complicated than I initially thought, and it's way less friction to use something like faceplant, which is entirely their point. Still, I think, if given the opportunity, and functional tools, and low enough friction, many would prefer to have a hand curated presence on the web above a facebook page.

I'll stop, but thanks for the interesting thought seed.

It exists because web browsers used to not have tabs. Nowadays it's useless cause with modern scripted web pages you never properly get back to the site you left

Yeah! StumbleUpon was cool. Something about how it tried to engender serendipity.

Such a pity that so many other good recommendation engines died or succumbed to enshittification.

Man I wanna like Kagi but I keep reading batshit things from its founder

Man what a trip, felt like I was hopping around the old web again.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

This is like the old StumbleUpon! Thanks for this!

What about https://webri.ng ?

There is also Gemini protocol!

You gotta be down to know whats up.

Oh man that site looks just like the internet before it started to suck.

Yes, please!

You didn't have a good experience with it, many of us did have some food experiences with it.

But it made going out on the Internet interesting. Today I'm not sure if its less or more risky to view a sketchy site, is it more risky now with ransom ware, data scraypers, and such.

Ide consider viruses to be less of a risk today, but my results probably vary

My experience was that those webrings often worth checking out if you didnt have something specific you were looking for today.

Its not the same at all, but theres a sense of my experience when i suddenly realize im on wikipedia and have opened 50+ tabs after I've finished what i was reading. Then just going through the tabs you have open