Webrings and SEO

Websites generally joined a webring in order to collect more traffic from associated sites. Back in those days, webrings could be measured a search engine optimization technique. And it maybe was since search engines had quite special ranking factors back then.
If you look at it now with the current ranking factors, webrings seem quite worthless for SEO as they would lack ability. Although there is physical linking to other websites, the links show up at random and the website owner doesn't control the “next” or “previous” link in the ring.
Of course a webring looks like a "link wheel." The power is much lower when webring expanded.
Imagine having 100 websites within a webring; there won’t be any link importance passed all the way back to the "original" website. But mostly the randomness and the embedded script/HTML of the link position takes the value out of webrings for your SEO campaign (though you might find some potential sites to seek links from).