Tedium.co deals with WP thru the "back door"

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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ericbarbour
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Tedium.co deals with WP thru the "back door"

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Nov 26, 2020 8:56 am

By writing a pretty-good essay about webrings, an almost-forgotten early internet system for linking to other sites.

https://tedium.co/2020/11/20/webring-history/
How an R-rated network of webrings set the stage for modern-day Wikipedia

It’s bizarre to think about today, but the roots of one of the internet’s largest and most fundamental sites come from a website that had a reputation crass enough that The Atlantic once called Bomis.com “the Playboy of the internet, helping guys find guy stuff.”

In a 2013 interview with Wired, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales bristled against the description of his pre-Wikipedia business endeavor, which had a lad-mag sensibility and would at times feature lightly-dressed models wearing Bomis t-shirts.

“That’s a completely ridiculous description,” Wales said of the comparison. “We allowed people to categorize whatever they wanted. One very popular category turned out to be image galleries of female actresses and so forth.”

Wales was correct on this front—the site was very much angled toward the interests of its users. Being a site that, like Wikipedia, was built around user generated content—with webrings generated by users—it often reflected less the zeitgeist and more the narrow taste of the obsessive.

It was the type of site that had a politics section that was loaded with libertarian theory, because that’s what its audience was into. It had a “babe” section, as well as webrings for various female celebrities. It was known for its Star Wars links. Its news section strongly favored online sources over traditional media, and included a page called “alternative news.”
Best part is: if a journalist tried to interview Wales today and brought up Bomis, I suspect JImbo would crash out of the room in a huff. He HATES being reminded of that idiotic site--or of the other flopped projects he tried at the time. Like 3apes. Or his "brilliant idea" for a search engine......
searchbastardscreenshot.png
searchbastardscreenshot.png (142.22 KiB) Viewed 1489 times
(Don't think that was real? See for yourself on archive.org. August 2000, months before Wikipedia started.)

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