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 com

by 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.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    Ah that's fine, I misunderstood what you said as if it meant that the internet didn't have people talking to one another back then. I think the internet is just scaled out more so it feels like a lot more, but I guess you got a point, most people I knew were not on the internet as much as I was. A lot of them had access, and I would talk to them when they came online.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  Honestly, it seems like we never successfully replicated the AOL/Prodigy era chat room paradigm. My family still has friends we met in late-90s AOL chat rooms, and we honestly ended up stuck on their dialup for years longer than would have been sane due to wanting to stick to that community (at the time, I think the bring-your-own-connection service was still an extra fee, so we'd have to pay $15 to a local ISP plus $15 for AOL or whatever, versus paying them $25 in the first place." There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience. I also wonder if by tying it to a paid service in the first place gave a bit more ammunition for moderators to handle the "obnoxious 12-year-old" class of troll.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    > There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience. Some clients are nice enough to include a list of common / popular servers, but they don't provide much more context about them. I would love to see some of those modern IRCv3 features but I'm not sure of clients supporting them and IRC networks supporting them.
jefftk 6y ago
One way that AOL was sticky was email addresses. I still know a few people, and my parents generation, who pay for AOL because they don't want to lose their aol.com email address. But I definitely agree that Facebook is a lot stickier: I have the impression that most of my Facebook graph would like to move somewhere else, but the combination of the difficulty of that coordination problem and no strong candidates for a replacement has kept us on Facebook.

by jasode 6y ago

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.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Ah that's fine, I misunderstood what you said as if it meant that the internet didn't have people talking to one another back then. I think the internet is just scaled out more so it feels like a lot more, but I guess you got a point, most people I knew were not on the internet as much as I was. A lot of them had access, and I would talk to them when they came online.
hakfoo 6y ago
Honestly, it seems like we never successfully replicated the AOL/Prodigy era chat room paradigm. My family still has friends we met in late-90s AOL chat rooms, and we honestly ended up stuck on their dialup for years longer than would have been sane due to wanting to stick to that community (at the time, I think the bring-your-own-connection service was still an extra fee, so we'd have to pay $15 to a local ISP plus $15 for AOL or whatever, versus paying them $25 in the first place." There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience. I also wonder if by tying it to a paid service in the first place gave a bit more ammunition for moderators to handle the "obnoxious 12-year-old" class of troll.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  > There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience. Some clients are nice enough to include a list of common / popular servers, but they don't provide much more context about them. I would love to see some of those modern IRCv3 features but I'm not sure of clients supporting them and IRC networks supporting them.

jefftk 6y ago

One way that AOL was sticky was email addresses. I still know a few people, and my parents generation, who pay for AOL because they don't want to lose their aol.com email address. But I definitely agree that Facebook is a lot stickier: I have the impression that most of my Facebook graph would like to move somewhere else, but the combination of the difficulty of that coordination problem and no strong candidates for a replacement has kept us on Facebook.