4 ms·

AOL got the "masses" on-line in 1993. That caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. All of the

by btilly 7y ago

AOL got the "masses" on-line in 1993. That caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. All of the sites that you named except Usenet postdated that event.

generalpass 7y ago
AOL began to get really big when they launched unlimited minutes, I think '96 or '97. The unwashed masses adopted a few years later. AOL of '02 was nothing like AOL of '97.
- geoelectric 7y ago
  I wouldn't put too much gloss on that. I was on AOL from its original GeoWorks-based release forward, and it always had considerably more mass appeal than icb/forumnet, IRC, Usenet, or any of the other Internet-based forums/chatrooms of the time. It was night-and-day. You have to remember before there was AOL there was Prodigy, Quantum Link/PC-Link (which became AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, etc--all services that were mass-marketed to some extent and had healthy user bases that were mostly not very technical or academic. Modems were easy to use and ubiquitous at that point so if you had a computer at home, there was a decent chance you had one. A lot of the early AOL folks consolidated from those services and the social BBS scenes, which were also not nearly as techie as you'd imagine. So yeah, there were a lot less of us than when they started shipping out discs with hundreds of hours and later unlimited, but the audience wasn't necessarily more sophisticated. As soon as it was a standalone app and not GeoWorks-based, in particular, it seriously took off.
Mister_X 7y ago
Sorry, wasn't trying to rewrite history, just making the point that those places were changed by an infusion of willfully ignorant people who drastically lowered the signal to noise ratio. I started on usenet in '85, and saw the decline there, but for slashdot and kuro5hin I seem to recall a different "trigger" of some sort that brought the masses there, it happened rapidly and was not a welcome change

by btilly 7y ago

generalpass 7y ago

AOL began to get really big when they launched unlimited minutes, I think '96 or '97. The unwashed masses adopted a few years later. AOL of '02 was nothing like AOL of '97.

geoelectric 7y ago
I wouldn't put too much gloss on that. I was on AOL from its original GeoWorks-based release forward, and it always had considerably more mass appeal than icb/forumnet, IRC, Usenet, or any of the other Internet-based forums/chatrooms of the time. It was night-and-day. You have to remember before there was AOL there was Prodigy, Quantum Link/PC-Link (which became AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, etc--all services that were mass-marketed to some extent and had healthy user bases that were mostly not very technical or academic. Modems were easy to use and ubiquitous at that point so if you had a computer at home, there was a decent chance you had one. A lot of the early AOL folks consolidated from those services and the social BBS scenes, which were also not nearly as techie as you'd imagine. So yeah, there were a lot less of us than when they started shipping out discs with hundreds of hours and later unlimited, but the audience wasn't necessarily more sophisticated. As soon as it was a standalone app and not GeoWorks-based, in particular, it seriously took off.

Mister_X 7y ago

Sorry, wasn't trying to rewrite history, just making the point that those places were changed by an infusion of willfully ignorant people who drastically lowered the signal to noise ratio. I started on usenet in '85, and saw the decline there, but for slashdot and kuro5hin I seem to recall a different "trigger" of some sort that brought the masses there, it happened rapidly and was not a welcome change