Webrings were a lot of people doing work for free or with little return. Nobody has time to do this anymore, and the only way to support such project would be paid membership (hard to gain traction) or ads (back to square one).
By every measure don't people have more time than ever before? I think it's more a dramatic shift in how people use & view the internet. The (unfortunate in a lot of ways) answer is probably create something new and exclusive, but universal enough for the target audience that's going to do all the work to align incentives, try to pull along the good and leave behind the bad. There has been and will continue to be a lot of false starts & failed attempts. If successful it will eventually be co-opted and ruined too. So it goes.
Thank you for the question. It really needs an explanation.
Times have changed. While there are significantly more open-source projects, online communities, and all kinds of available help than ever before, the proportion of active contributors relative to the number of people online has decreased. Consequently, the time required for each volunteer to process input for a project like a "webring" has increased significantly.
I also feel that it's become harder to motivate people, but not because they've become lazier. Rather, the tasks have become more demanding, so "nobody seems to have the time for them anymore".
The scale of the internet is too large for individual consumption search engines and word of mouth are the methods I see for distributing access. Search engines need individual Judgement to evaluate results and word of mouth provides context clues and trust.
Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.
IDK; the sites I regularly visit nowadays are all either one-off personal projects I learned about through word of mouth or user-centric portals like HN where I get that word of mouth. I guess it's kind of what digg used to be.
