5 ms·

Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the comp

Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally

searchableguy 6y ago
What's the difference between hn and a facebook group?
- chrisco255 6y ago
  HN does not have 2 billion users and teams of thousands of developers working to exploit psychology and an ad monopoly to keep you on HN.
- nogabebop23 6y ago
  HN is one website with a very small audience of people who understand how it fits into the broader internet. A FB group is what a much, much larger set of less experienced users have been taught is "how you communicate with your tribe". That's not only very different but chillingly scary, IMO
- arnvald 6y ago
  HN allows you to see all the content without registration. Facebook pushes login pop-ups even on pages of restaurants etc (which often replace independent websites these days)
- jasode 6y ago
  >What's the difference between hn and a facebook group? - creating a discussion forum like HN -- whether via PG's custom Lisp programming or installing/hosting software like PhpBB/Vbulletin is way more difficult for non-techie users. Compare that to the easy steps of creating a new Facebook group.[1] - HN is a mixture of real names, pseudonymous, and anonymous identities. Facebook is mostly real names. - HN has no integrated calendar of related events, no rich media like photos and videos, no realtime chat with group members. Facebook groups can include that. Yes, HN demographic hates all that distracting "noise" but Facebook demographic does not. [1] https://www.facebook.com/help/167970719931213 https://www.facebook.com/help/167970719931213
pjmlp 6y ago
Yep that is to be expected when for a large part of the population the built-in browser is the Internet, and for many of those persons, AOL, FB are what Internet means on their universum.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
AOL at least was pretty strictly a US phenomenon. Here in Canada it wasn't a thing, and it wasn't a thing in Europe or Asia. FB's tendril's are international. What's worse is it's very walled off, it's not really searchable or properly indexed. FB's search facilities are a joke, such as they are, but they are only available to FB users. Information that goes in there is basically available to FB and to nobody else.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Back in the day, Compuserve was quite popular in the UK, and I had understood the rest of the Europe too. I never used AOL, but I believe it was similar to Compuserve - a walled garden with forums, file downloads, instant messaging and such. Like AOL, Compuserve reached popularity during the infancy of the web - the web, viewed through Netscape Navigator at the time, was really rather basic, and comparatively empty, or at least so it seemed to me at the time. I actually remember thinking Compuserve was far superior to the web, and scoffed that the web would never take off. How wrong I was!
  - wott 6y ago
    I am not sure but I think I used Compuserve too, in France. AOL came, but later and more as one Internet provider in many, and much like the others. It was a bit difficult for us to understand the image and all the memes about AOL, so you had to learn that it meant "Internet for noobs / Joe Six-Pack" in American texts.
- a_bonobo 6y ago
  I did have AOL in the early days of 56k in Germany. It was the same walled garden as it was in the US, and I was 'locked in' that garden without knowing. I must've been 12 or 14 years old and this was our very first internet.
- jt2190 6y ago
  > Here in Canada it wasn’t a thing... I sure remember it was a “thing” in Canada, especially before most people were on the internet. https://youtu.be/iaJsc6DHYkE https://youtu.be/iaJsc6DHYkE
pyrale 6y ago
No, because most uses back then were not integrated in internet. Parents at school did not rely solely on AOL to get news, communicate with each other, etc.
alangibson 6y ago
AOL died off because the world shifted to the open web. The only way Facebook or Google die off is if a similar paradigm shift occurs.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  It's about time for true change and the open interweb as Tim Berners Lee et al. conceived it. I currently only see ipfs as a viable alternative, but with another markdown format so we need no chrome browser.
  - DarthGhandi 6y ago
    Tim Berners Lee himself has a project aimed at this. I like IPFS but it's still quite clunky to use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  AOL died off, but also Microsoft was faced with antitrust. The combination is best, and our efforts on each are in fact complementary: we need the politicians to understand how the status quo is not workable outcome, and there is a budding alternative ready to flourish if given some breathing room. That will embolden them.
jasode 6y ago
>Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally AOL was dominant (~30 million dialup subscribers at its 2002 peak) but didn't build any "sticky" products such as Facebook's social graph (a very valuable online Rolodex contacts database of real names). Each dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today. Thus, switching from AOL access via telephone modems to cable broadband was easier than today's idea of switching away from Facebook's connected contacts. (E.g. Even Google with all its billions and web dominance couldn't get Facebook users to switch to Google+ in 2011.) That said, I still believe Facebook dominance can be supplanted but it will happen by accident : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15263715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15263715
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  > dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today. Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah. MSN Messenger had MSN chat which was IRC esque and MSN Groups had their own instances or chat it was glorious. Anywhere you went with chatrooms the internet attracted people like crazy! AOL was definitely full of those types. AOL also had annoying (to me) parental control settings. Thankfully I could justify internet access outside the AOL program by stating that games didnt work online otherwise I would be restricted to AOLs trashy browser.
  - jasode 6y ago
    >Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms My phrase of "interact that much" was relative to today's Facebook type of social penetration. Yes, I also interacted with others on old USENET, BBSs, Compuserve (CIS userid), AOL, etc. Many of us did. But Facebook's social graph is the phenomenon that bridged the gap of grandparents seeing updates on the grandkids, high school alumni and past coworkers "finding" each other again and extending weak ties ("friend each other"). This type of social interaction is very sticky and difficult to switch away from. USENET/CIS/AOL level of interaction was much weaker.
nogabebop23 6y ago
At its peak AOL had millions of users and the internet accounted for a tiny fraction of a person's life. The number of people who viewed AOL a "the internet" and the impact it had on them was a rounding error compared to FB's breadth and depth of integration into the very identity of it's userbase.

Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally

searchableguy 6y ago

What's the difference between hn and a facebook group?

chrisco255 6y ago
HN does not have 2 billion users and teams of thousands of developers working to exploit psychology and an ad monopoly to keep you on HN.
nogabebop23 6y ago
HN is one website with a very small audience of people who understand how it fits into the broader internet. A FB group is what a much, much larger set of less experienced users have been taught is "how you communicate with your tribe". That's not only very different but chillingly scary, IMO
arnvald 6y ago
HN allows you to see all the content without registration. Facebook pushes login pop-ups even on pages of restaurants etc (which often replace independent websites these days)
jasode 6y ago
>What's the difference between hn and a facebook group? - creating a discussion forum like HN -- whether via PG's custom Lisp programming or installing/hosting software like PhpBB/Vbulletin is way more difficult for non-techie users. Compare that to the easy steps of creating a new Facebook group.[1] - HN is a mixture of real names, pseudonymous, and anonymous identities. Facebook is mostly real names. - HN has no integrated calendar of related events, no rich media like photos and videos, no realtime chat with group members. Facebook groups can include that. Yes, HN demographic hates all that distracting "noise" but Facebook demographic does not. [1] https://www.facebook.com/help/167970719931213 https://www.facebook.com/help/167970719931213

pjmlp 6y ago

Yep that is to be expected when for a large part of the population the built-in browser is the Internet, and for many of those persons, AOL, FB are what Internet means on their universum.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

AOL at least was pretty strictly a US phenomenon. Here in Canada it wasn't a thing, and it wasn't a thing in Europe or Asia. FB's tendril's are international. What's worse is it's very walled off, it's not really searchable or properly indexed. FB's search facilities are a joke, such as they are, but they are only available to FB users. Information that goes in there is basically available to FB and to nobody else.

GordonS 6y ago
Back in the day, Compuserve was quite popular in the UK, and I had understood the rest of the Europe too. I never used AOL, but I believe it was similar to Compuserve - a walled garden with forums, file downloads, instant messaging and such. Like AOL, Compuserve reached popularity during the infancy of the web - the web, viewed through Netscape Navigator at the time, was really rather basic, and comparatively empty, or at least so it seemed to me at the time. I actually remember thinking Compuserve was far superior to the web, and scoffed that the web would never take off. How wrong I was!
- wott 6y ago
  I am not sure but I think I used Compuserve too, in France. AOL came, but later and more as one Internet provider in many, and much like the others. It was a bit difficult for us to understand the image and all the memes about AOL, so you had to learn that it meant "Internet for noobs / Joe Six-Pack" in American texts.
a_bonobo 6y ago
I did have AOL in the early days of 56k in Germany. It was the same walled garden as it was in the US, and I was 'locked in' that garden without knowing. I must've been 12 or 14 years old and this was our very first internet.
jt2190 6y ago
> Here in Canada it wasn’t a thing... I sure remember it was a “thing” in Canada, especially before most people were on the internet. https://youtu.be/iaJsc6DHYkE https://youtu.be/iaJsc6DHYkE

pyrale 6y ago

No, because most uses back then were not integrated in internet. Parents at school did not rely solely on AOL to get news, communicate with each other, etc.

alangibson 6y ago

AOL died off because the world shifted to the open web. The only way Facebook or Google die off is if a similar paradigm shift occurs.

jhoechtl 6y ago
It's about time for true change and the open interweb as Tim Berners Lee et al. conceived it. I currently only see ipfs as a viable alternative, but with another markdown format so we need no chrome browser.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  Tim Berners Lee himself has a project aimed at this. I like IPFS but it's still quite clunky to use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
Ericson2314 6y ago
AOL died off, but also Microsoft was faced with antitrust. The combination is best, and our efforts on each are in fact complementary: we need the politicians to understand how the status quo is not workable outcome, and there is a budding alternative ready to flourish if given some breathing room. That will embolden them.

jasode 6y ago

>Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally AOL was dominant (~30 million dialup subscribers at its 2002 peak) but didn't build any "sticky" products such as Facebook's social graph (a very valuable online Rolodex contacts database of real names). Each dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today. Thus, switching from AOL access via telephone modems to cable broadband was easier than today's idea of switching away from Facebook's connected contacts. (E.g. Even Google with all its billions and web dominance couldn't get Facebook users to switch to Google+ in 2011.) That said, I still believe Facebook dominance can be supplanted but it will happen by accident : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15263715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15263715

giancarlostoro 6y ago
> dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today. Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah. MSN Messenger had MSN chat which was IRC esque and MSN Groups had their own instances or chat it was glorious. Anywhere you went with chatrooms the internet attracted people like crazy! AOL was definitely full of those types. AOL also had annoying (to me) parental control settings. Thankfully I could justify internet access outside the AOL program by stating that games didnt work online otherwise I would be restricted to AOLs trashy browser.
- jasode 6y ago
  >Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms My phrase of "interact that much" was relative to today's Facebook type of social penetration. Yes, I also interacted with others on old USENET, BBSs, Compuserve (CIS userid), AOL, etc. Many of us did. But Facebook's social graph is the phenomenon that bridged the gap of grandparents seeing updates on the grandkids, high school alumni and past coworkers "finding" each other again and extending weak ties ("friend each other"). This type of social interaction is very sticky and difficult to switch away from. USENET/CIS/AOL level of interaction was much weaker.

nogabebop23 6y ago

At its peak AOL had millions of users and the internet accounted for a tiny fraction of a person's life. The number of people who viewed AOL a "the internet" and the impact it had on them was a rounding error compared to FB's breadth and depth of integration into the very identity of it's userbase.