Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.

And if you're looking for something specific - "I want to learn category theory" - then you don't visit a small web site because the content you're looking for is probably not on any woefully short, hand-curated list of URLs. So you do a normal web search (or ask your chatbot).

Another problem with web rings is that if you're hopping sites at random, you more often than not end up someplace weird in 3-5 hops. I guess it's the internet version of six degrees of separation: you're always at most six clicks away from neo-Nazis or SEO spammers.

That has both caught on, is well-supported by WordPress and lots of other tools since forever, and is notable enough that there's a glossary entry for it on Wikipedia:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogroll>

It's partly why OPML exists.

The furthest branches have the least volume (need filters to stop bulk submission to all levels, but still allow some multi submission). It allows curators to contribute in a small field. They then submit their preferred items to the next level up. If that curator likes it they send it further. A leaf level curator can bypass any curator above but with the same risk of being ignored if the higher level node receives too much volume.

You could even run fully AI branches where their picks would only make all the way up by convincing a human curator somewhere above them of the quality. If they don't do a good job they would just be ignored. People can listen to them direct if they are so inclined

The economic incentive is overwhelming to corrupt these signals, either directly (link sharing schemes, upvote rings, bots to like your content) or indirectly (shaping your content itself to have the shape of what will be promoted, regardless of its quality).

What you almost want is to use any of these ideas and hope for it to catch on widely enough in your small niche to be useful, but not so much that it comes an optimization target.

I think OpenRing does that? [1]. Not my blog, just linking for illustration, but you can see how it looks here at the bottom of the page: https://drewdevault.com/2020/02/06/Dependencies-and-maintain...

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring

I'm a big web ring person though so I might be biased and trying to use a hammer in place of a screwdriver.

Imho this is better at the blog post level of granularity. Sometimes I will like someone's writing style, much more often I will be interested in topical recommended reading.

I have been doing this by linking my linkhut profile with either my profile picture (I used to) or just mentioning it in comments like I am doing right now

https://ln.ht/~imafh , Although not really entirely to blogs, I have this place to recommend cool musicians,projects,links that I have found and I write a short note in all of them as to why I really liked the link. But with tags you can especially have a #blog #webring and use linkhut with notes feature

What do you think about linkhut, I had submitted it to hackernews as a submission after finding it but there wasn't really much traction to it, I am not going to lie when I say this when this feature really resonated with me so much.

I hope more people come to know about linkhut, I hope I am doing my part in making people know about it :)

There was some overlap between the webring age and the early search age, but once search became entrenched and useful, webrings faded. Blogrolls survived for a little bit longer, but it was search.

Specifically, once search became the way you found the first page/site to begin with. Before search as default, you found sites in a bunch of scattershot ways: advertisements, word of mouth, lists in books, or lists on websites that updated periodically (that you had to have found/heard about one of the other ways) for example. Then you crawled out from there because that was the only way to find things. You had to either know the URL or use a link. And not all of the links/sites in the webrings were good.

Once search got good enough, people found the initial site via search and instead of taking their time clicking through a webring which might at any point lead them somewhere dead or useless, it was quicker to go back to the search page to find something else.

Page access went from being a chained together web of back and forth links to a 2 step process of search -> page.

If you want to be exceptionally kind, you can also email the submitter and tell them their blog has been removed due to inactivity, so they'll remember to submit if they start blogging again.

Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.