The Old Ways Have Returned

There’s a new button at the bottom of the Equip Story website. Normally, I wouldn’t dedicate an entire newsletter to a tiny button, but it’s a significant little button. A sign of the times merely 88 pixels wide.

TL;DR: I joined a web ring and therefore the internet is healing.

If you don’t know what a “web ring” is: Congratulations on being a young person! Do all your internal organs work as expected? Awesome, bro. They won’t always. Enjoy them while you can!

I’m pretty sure I was on America Online around 1995, when I was in middle school. Prior to having internet at home, I had used CompuServe and dial-up BBSes at friends’ houses. Back in those days, being online was like surfin’, maaan. Sometimes you got onto the computer and rode gnarly waves of content. Other times the content waters were pretty flat. There was a lot of stuff out there, but finding good stuff was the challenge. There were no feeds or even search engines as we knew them today. The primary way I found out about websites in the mid-90s was by reading computer magazines with links in them!

Web rings were an early attempt to help users discover what was on the web. At the bottom of a website, you would see a small box that said something like, “A Member of the Agent Mulder is Sexy Web Ring.” You’d click the link to see a list of other sites that joined the web ring. Sometimes they would have “Previous” and “Next” links, so you could travel blindly from site to site without going to the list. To join a web ring, the site owner had to apply to the organizer through an email or form. If their website got in, their guestbooks would suddenly fill up with messages from fellow Lone Gunmen traveling the web ring.

Web rings are something I hadn’t experienced in a long time, like Sunny Delight or Functioning Democracy. So imagine my surprise when I read on the video game blog Virtual Moose (whose birthday challenge I participated in) about a new web ring called Warp Point. All the websites on Warp Point are video game themed. They have a category of sites about game development, so I submitted Equip Story for consideration. After all, I write a lot about my adventures in bear wrestling video game development.

I’m happy to say that Equip Story is an official member of Warp Point! To enjoy the web ring for yourself, visit the footer of the Equip Story website. More high quality video game blogs and newsletters await you.

Similarly, I submitted ALL-CARDS to a rad site called Solo RPG List. The site is a curated selection of solo and duet TTRPGs with over 1000 games listed! Since I designed ALL-CARDS with both solo and duet modes, I figured I should submit the game. I’m glad I did, because it was accepted to the site! The day the submission went live, ALL-CARDS sold enough copies to be the #1 Hottest Game on Indie Press Revolution’s website.

The early internet was all about curated discovery. Before Google auto-crawled the web, you had to submit your website via email to Yahoo! for consideration. If your site was accepted, it would be featured in a sub-category on their directory of “all” websites. A few years later, if you wanted your blog post to go early viral, you had to submit your post to a link aggregators like GorillaMask, or a classier affair like BoingBoing. A human being looked through submissions, found the stuff they thought was cool, and blasted the link out to a wider audience. These curators earned an audience by regularly featuring cool stuff. They had a refined palette for violent stick figure Flash games and Quiznos rat memes.

Traditional gatekeeping was far from perfect. Actually, in many ways, it totally sucked! Gatekeepers were prejudiced in their selections, leading to content discrimination. They let friends slip past the proverbial gate, while leaving less connected and more deserving creators out in the digital cold. They abused their power in horrible ways. But human gatekeepers often had two important admirable traits. They had an informed sense of taste and they loved art enough to dedicate their time to sharing it. Those admirable traits don’t excuse rotten behavior. We should demand better of human gatekeepers. But having experienced the Age of the Algorithm, I’m demanding human gatekeepers again.

I’ve been a gatekeeper before. I’ve gone through slush piles. It’s hard work finding diamonds in the rough. When you finally do, the thrill of discovery, and sharing your discovery, is a kind of giddy high. One that spreads across the internet from person to person. “For You” feeds lack that spark. “Oh, you watch videos about car repair? Here’s a hundred videos about car repair.” No, YouTube. I just needed to get my car alarm to shut up one time.

We still have human gatekeepers for internet content, but in a less direct way. Social media sites, video sites, and AI chatbots don’t rifle through submissions and cherry pick stuff to feature. The current gatekeepers of internet content are the programmers, systems designers, and executives behind the algorithms that power our feeds. Their job isn’t to discover and share cool stuff. They write code to serve you whatever slop will keep you glued to your phone for as long as possible, which means hacking your emotions to hijack your attention. They don’t earn traffic through good curation. They traffic in addiction and automation.

Projects like Warp Point and the Solo RPG List fly directly in the face of algorithms. They are human made websites designed to serve human needs for connection and entertainment. It’s no coincidence both sites have anti-AI policies. We’re getting sick of content made by robots, curated by robots, then commented on by robots. We want human voices recommended to us by our fellow humans. The internet is a big place. I’m excited to see people carving out spaces for ourselves again.

🎲 Your Turn: What do you think of the old school internet? Do you prefer today’s web or yesterday’s? What other elements of the old internet would you like to see make a comeback? How do you discover cool new stuff online? I’d love to know what you think! Reply directly to this email or leave a comment by hitting the orange button below.