15 ms·

Facebook Is the AOL of 2021

319 points by afrcnc 5y ago

patorjk 5y ago
> People even discovered more of the Internet, such as things like "file transfer protocol," where they could get lots of stuff no one had ever seen in the form of files. Programs such as "finger" let a person see who had been online, which, again, blew people's minds. People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. This person's explanation for why AOL died does not match up with my memories. I remember regularly using AOL's built in web browser (which was just a wrapper around IE) to surf the web. The reason my family switched away from AOL was because we could get faster internet through our cable company. It had nothing to do with FTP, fingering, or "discovering the world wide web". > The business people decided that there should be a way to make something like AOL, even though everyone thought Web sites were amazing and didn't want to go back. Again, this just doesn't line-up with how I remember things. I remember people liking the sense of community AOL had (the chats, IMs, forums, etc). It was other factors (faster internet, etc), that led to AOL's downfall.
- dumbfounder 5y ago
  TIL FTP took down AOL. Did a human actually write that? Wow. AOL died because it was a walled garden filled with manure and very few actual plants.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    > a walled garden filled with manure and very few actual plants. Sounds like Facebook in 2021.
    - MBCook 5y ago
      Honestly it was Disneyland compared to FB. Because it was a paid service they tried to keep it clean and nice. It never would have hosted the kind of anti-vax-blow-up-the-government stuff and promoted it as prime content like FB.
      - OzzyB 5y ago
        What you really mean is that it was US centric and wasn't spammed to death by bot networks and state-backed actors that want to sow division. The fact that you had to get the disk and pay with a credit card created one of the best online user experiences we had.
        jack_pp 5y ago
        That wouldn't stop state backed actors today but I agree with the first paragraph
        rightbyte 5y ago
        The Internet Boogeyman from Russia and China is a fairy tale to scare kids you know. Wildly exaggerated threat. Bot farms is an ads problem. The feed algorithm that maximize for 'engagement', in the same sense a traffic jam does, is the main culprit. Using Facebook, Instagram now gives you no power over what you see, just faint wishes that Zuckerberg somewhat fulfills every 4th post.
        stjohnswarts 5y ago
        You're wrong. I've checked out many facebook propaganda sources and they are all laughingly obvious that they are state actors OR US internal sources that Facebook could quickly remove with minimal fuss. Yes the English was terrible and the propaganda horribly obvious (yet dumbasses on FB still buy into it or feed the troll). Anyway, FB doesn't want to remove them unless they pop up in mainstream media, otherwise they are very safe because they drive up viewership and commenting and the Zuck loves that.
        rightbyte 5y ago
        Sure, I don't mean it doesn't exist, but that it is just not that impactfull compared to domestic lunatics. I agree FB is very bad at removing syntetic 'content farm' content.
      - RJSquirel 5y ago
    - hellbannedguy 5y ago
      As much as I despise FB, the Pages, and Groups, are great. I do think Nextdoor will give FB competition though. If they don't buy it up? (I despise Nextdoor. To me it's just people complaining about their neighborhood. Will never understand the guy who sits home, and complains about the car parked on the street, or who's dog deficated on their lawn. That said, I hear strangers taking about the site, and asking for invites. It's privately owned now, but will make a few people billionaires soon.)
      - spideymans 5y ago
        I would love to read into the psychology of these people. You know, the busybody, snitchy neighbour type. The type that scrutinizes a neighbours home improvements for the most trivial of infractions (we don't allow this colour of flower in this HOA!), or who threatens to report people for banal things that aren't even illegal (gasp... someone legally parked on the publicly owned street).
        cratermoon 5y ago
        There's something called other-directed perfectionism that could be at work. Someone who can't stand to see imperfections around them or tolerate the fact the humans are just imperfect.
    - hopesthoughts 5y ago
      Or 2020, or 2019. Wait, that sounds like Facebook since it's creation.
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    It's the type of myopic perspective that I would expect from a comment here instead.
- jamestenglish 5y ago
  I had the exact same reaction to reading those lines. Everyone I knew was more than happy to use AOL to surf the World Wide Web it was only when their cost and speed stagnated next to competitors did people jump ship.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    AOL thought they were an ISP, when really they were a media and community company. I was a kid in the 90s, and my friends' parents didn't want them on the broader internet. AOL was considered safe. While they should have leaned into that, they also had an uphill battle - people now paid their cable companies for internet access, and didn't want to pay AOL's (high) prices for access to content.
  - outworlder 5y ago
    > Everyone I knew was more than happy to use AOL to surf the World Wide Web Which was a service AOL didn't really provide at first. Only when it became a kind of ISP.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  Your memory of AOL isn't old enough, then. I remember AOL before they had a web browser, which they later reluctantly added in a bid to keep relevance. You remember the latter days of AOL, when the writing was on the wall.
  - patorjk 5y ago
    I setup my own geocities website in 1998, so they had to have had it then. According to the document here [1], AOL's web browser was introduced in 1995. [1] https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/2/ https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/2/
    - nostrademons 5y ago
      1998 is the later days of AOL. Its heyday was 1991-1995, when basically everybody got multiple AOL disks in the mail, you'd have TV advertisements telling you to visit a certain AOL keyword, and they were basically the only user-friendly way of getting online. (The competition like Prodigy or Compuserve had very clunky user interfaces, and GEnie and BBSes were text-only.) The writing was on the wall for AOL as soon as Netscape and Yahoo came out in 1994.
      - trainsplanes 5y ago
        Feels strange to say 1991 was the heyday. I don't know of a single person with a home PC in 1991, much less internet. Mid-90s to very early 2000s was nonstop AOL commercials and CDs in the mail. Chat rooms were booming and you couldn't watch a single TV show without a "You've got mail!" reference.
        kevinventullo 5y ago
        To bolster your point, the movie “You’ve Got Mail” released in December 1998.
        nostrademons 5y ago
        "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." -- William Gibson. I was the last of my friends in elementary school to get a computer - my first was a Mac LC in 1991. Where I was, they were rare in 1986 but ubiquitous by about 1989. Would go over to friends' houses to play Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, or Number Munchers. I was on the WWW by 1994. Grew up in suburban Boston, so the area was relatively affluent and educated. I suspect this is like how my 3-year-old (growing up in Silicon Valley) thinks that robots, self-driving cars, and drones are just an ordinary part of reality, while they remain science-fiction for many Americans.
- markandrewj 5y ago
  I find many of the articles on ZDNet, and CNET, are either inaccurate, fluff, or clickbait.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    Especially CNET these days, wow!! They used to write good articles like 10 years ago. Not anymore!!
- taf2 5y ago
  Exactly, AOL failed to move on broadband because the subscription model they had with dial up internet was very profitable. Additionally, the cable companies realizing the opportunity were not about to let AOL to continue to collect rent over their wires... Facebook is very different from AOL.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    AOL is the reason I got broadband. I tried to cancel and they gave me 6 free months of high-speed to stay with them, with a recurring rate that was $10 more than the provider who delivered the high-speed to my house. After the 6 months was up, I cancelled AOL and stayed with the provider.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    Though what allowed cable/DSL companies to move into the ISP business was the complete decoupling of content from access. In 1991, when there was no practical WWW and you navigated a bunch of proprietary content by typing in AOL keywords, a cable company would've had to implement a full graphical browser and a large library of content to be useful. By 1998, when we had Netscape and IE and Yahoo and millions of websites, those industries were all disaggregated and we just needed the pipes. There's a lesson in unbundling here, but it probably doesn't apply to Facebookin quite the manner the author intends.
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    I suspect the problem is that they had no infrastructure to sell. They should have been doing co-branded offerings fulfilled by local telecoms. Once people are calling to say "I called the local telecom and ordered DSL/Cable direct, close my account", they're trying to negotiate customer retention from the back foot. I know plenty of people held onto AOL for a long time because of specific communities-- their chat service was more accessible than IRC, and as mentioned elsewhere, tying it to a bill and an identity was a good way to keep it from getting too toxic. My family held out until 2006 or so because of one such community. We were willing to put up with 56k slowness until I got a webdev position and needed the ability to do work-from-home with a reasonable turnaround. There was a definite point though where you could tell they had decided to give up on investment. The client was ever buggier and weirder, they stopped offering Usenet, and their internal forum system got retooled in a way that nobody really liked. I suspect at the end, the chat service was probably their last moat for their userbase.
- madrox 5y ago
  And the price. AOL charged by the minute and were slow to switch to unlimited...much like Blockbuster was reluctant to kill late fees and ended up losing to Netflix's DVD distribution (even before they got into streaming).
  - takeda 5y ago
    I guess that was motivator to look for alternatives. I found it funny when people started switching to broadband and AOL still somehow convinced them they'll need to pay them.
- ssharp 5y ago
  I grew up on AOL's internet and it really wasn't that bad. The WWW was a lot different back then. Remember, this was even before Google! The article acts like AOL was some wasteland that the company never bothered to update. AOL offered a lot of content, games, file sharing, chat, message boards, email, etc. that was difficult to get elsewhere for most people. Our family (myself included) liked AOL enough that we continued to pay a reduced monthly fee to connect to their service over TCP/IP when the local ISP's started offering better connection options.
  - Alex3917 5y ago
    > I grew up on AOL's internet and it really wasn't that bad. It was down for a couple hours per day almost every single day during the few years when they were in hyper growth. But the actual service itself was pretty great when it worked.
    - TuringNYC 5y ago
      Funny story - they switched to an Unlimited hours policy (slowly creeping up from several hours over time.) As a result people just dialed up for long periods of time and made lines busy. It had a second effect - it was busy so often, that once you dialed in it was in your best interest not to dial out...because who knows when you could get back in. Thus the congestion intensified. On top of that, there were programs like A-O-Hell which let people circumvent payment (and it seemed AOL liked it because who knows what metrics were lifted as a result). So you had even more users on the system, again with no incentive to use the system less.
      - spideymans 5y ago
        >On top of that, there were programs like A-O-Hell which let people circumvent payment Looked up AOHell on Wikipedia and landed on this interesting tidbit: >Most notably, the program included a function for stealing the passwords of America Online users and, according to its creator, contains the first recorded mention of the term "phishing"
- sammalloy 5y ago
  > The reason my family switched away from AOL was because we could get faster internet through our cable company. This is exactly the reason AOL went away. People initially switched to ISPs, then to local telecoms, then to cable providers.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    Yea, but their site was never very good? Even at the time, I felt they didn't quite know what do with their group site. Every few months/years, I would check back, and still found the site the same.
- empressplay 5y ago
  Eventually the replication of free versions of AOL's services on the broader Internet devalued its offering to the point that once standalone Internet connections were cheaper and more broadly available (especially things like NetZero) people simply dumped their AOL subscriptions or never subscribed in the first place. What this has to do with Facebook I do not know -- for what Facebook does, centralization is a feature and not a bug. I do wish the author had at least read the Wikipedia page on AOL before writing their piece though, although it probably would have invalidated their premise.
- jdkee 5y ago
  And then came the Eternal September. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written. I think it will be harder to unseat Facebook than it was for AOL simply because of size. At its peak, AOL had around 34 million subscribers. Thus you could easily grow and build by service by appealing to people who had never been on AOL and who we’re not enmeshed in the AOL ecosystem. Facebook has billions of users. There aren’t enough people in the world who have Internet access to allow someone to build a massive service out of people who have never been on Facebook. Add to that Instagram and WhatsApp and there are not that many people who are on the Internet but not a part of Facebook’s ecosystem.
- adventured 5y ago
  Facebook doesn't get unseated, it splinters, losing potency gradually (assuming regulators keep them from buying the competition). Facebook will still be the dominate global social network 10-20 years from now. What will change is that there will be more niche social networks with approaches/audiences/subjects-of-focus that Facebook couldn't cater to well enough (which is why Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Imgur exist).
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Well I'm not anymore. I've never used Whats app and have absolutely no need for Instagram. I was on Facebook itself until I couldn't stand it.
djhworld 5y ago
A lot of people I know have online lives that live within or around facebook and nothing else. They get their news from facebook as the news/media organisation posts updates to their feeds, which they can share with others via WhatsApp or messenger. No need to visit the news sites it's all there. They get their local second hand marketplace through Facebook Marketplace, no need for eBay et al. They get their local community updates, gossip, business recommendations etc. through Facebook Groups. No need for nextdoor or neighbourhoood specific websites/forums. They can find local businesses through the Facebook as the businesses have a Page that describes what they do, testimonials from previous customers, bit of a social feed to add some personality/'blogging'. Contactable through messenger. The businesses don't need to setup a website, Facebook offers all the tools. You never have to leave, especially on iOS/Android if you use the facebook app. Even links to external sites are rendered in a webview, so no need to look at URLs.
- function_seven 5y ago
  I've been dragged into Instagram. For months now I've been searching for some good used furniture. Mostly MCM stuff. I'd prefer private party sales, but am open to dealers as well. For the personal side I was checking Nextdoor, Craigslist, and OfferUp. Hours of scrolling and modifying search queries and I couldn't find anything worth checking out. Those sites are for $50 couches and $20 bookshelves. For the dealer side, I was just searching the web. My impression was that furniture dealers were either a dying business, or all search engines suck. The only results I kept getting were Pinterest, 1stdibs, or Chairish. These are sites with insane markups where (I suspect) you're supposed to be smart enough to haggle down. I gather they also take a large cut, so not many dealers list with them at all. I finally got a clue and re-animated my ancient IG account. Whaddayaknow? That's where everyone is! Suddenly I've found and followed a couple dozen resale shops that offer all sorts of cool stuff. All within an hour of where I live. Half the time, the URL they have in their bio is a dead website. Or, it exists but hasn't been updated in months. They've given up on having their own website and sell only inside the walled garden now. It's a shame. I still haven't logged into Facebook proper. I probably should find out if Marketplace is better than Craigslist, et. al. for classified ads.
  - 5y ago
bastardoperator 5y ago
My personal take. AOL died when private rooms stopped being private and the personal filing cabinet (unlimited storage) was discontinued. AOL easily had the biggest warez scene, once that was over and nobody could share files they went elsewhere.
- silisili 5y ago
  I think it started when broadband started rolling out nationally in the late 90s. My whole neighborhood for example was on dialup, everyone used AOL(for the most part), and just like that, it was gone once @home rolled fiber optics. AOL didn't seem to have any plan for that. Our family actually wanted to keep AOL, but they still wanted their 24.99 or whatever for the privilege, and well, few people found it worth it.
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Yep. Basically this. Everything else is silly speculation. Download speeds went from agonizing, even for the time!, to eye watering fast. I remember downloading 300MB in roughly 30 minutes to an hour back then. To me that was absolutely incredible. And it was! For the time. Whatever AOL was doing back then was irrelevant. Warez moved from place to place. People knew this and responded to the changes over the years as things naturally evolved.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Yeah, it completely changed how the internet and computers in general were used. Early advertising was 'look how quick it is, youll save so much time.' But that turned into 'hey this doesn't suck, I'll spend more time online!' The biggest change for me, personally, was going from an HPB to an LPB. That brings back old memories. Does that terminology even exist anymore?
      - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
        We've lost a lot of cool acronyms and initialisms over the years, and I've seen others paired down, but I think we lost HPB and LPB for sure.
ElijahLynn 5y ago
Ahh, I was thinking MySpace...
nemo44x 5y ago
My mom discovered Facebook last weekend and opened an account and is trying to figure out how to use it. I considered opening a short position in FB today.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  The day my mom joined Twitter, I freaked out!! Well she never was on Twitter, Twitter just said she was.
dheera 5y ago
The biggest turnoff about AOL to me is that I wanted the internet to be a world thing not an America thing.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Most ISPs operate in a specific area, even today.
  - dheera 5y ago
    Sure, but that's usually a logistical limitation, not that you're supporting only having that specific area online. Also in general the word "America" turns me off unless used to refer to the entirety of North and South America, and wreaks of US-centric view of the world. United States of America (USA) != America
    - adventured 5y ago
      America == The United States of America The opening line on Wikipedia: "The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America" Even the French and German wikis say the same thing. Why? Because America is a near universally understood abbreviation of The United States of America. Logical brevity is all that's about. No other nation on the planet has "America" in its name, which is just one more reason why there's so little confusion about which nation is being referred to and why it's obviously a trivial matter. It has been a widely understood name for the US for two centuries. It has been in wide use since long before the US was a globally relevant or powerful nation, which entirely invalidates your notion that it somehow relates to a US-centric view of the world. The people of the US are very commonly known as Americans, not USians or United Statesians. North America is a continent. South America is a continent. America is the abbreviated name for a country. It's not complicated to differentiate.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 5y ago
7thaccount 5y ago
I left Facebook years ago and have no reason to go back. I can share photos and videos with friends and family easily enough. Most of the online relationships were pretty superficial as well, so I don't need them anyway. Facebook does have some value, but it seems like the signal to noise ratio is very low. I'm not sure how rare my case is though. How many people in there 20-40s feel the same?
- warp 5y ago
  Here in Ecuador most of my immediate friends and family have moved to sharing photos and videos in private whatsapp groups. So they've moved away from Facebook the product, but not Facebook the company.
- matt_s 5y ago
  I mostly use it for family that is on there. The "feed" is horrible, filled with ads and timely things always appear out of order. Stuff from neighborhood sometimes shows something from 3 days after something occurred higher than something today.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Yeah I don't know how people get their news this way... It drives me insane that it'll consistently show me weather from 4 days ago but not today. NOT USEFUL.
- dummydata 5y ago
  I feel the same. Most my friends just use Instagram (for memes mostly). I like using just Snapchat for sharing photos with my close friends, which is better than sharing with literally everyone. Of course, you still have people who's primary motive is to farm for likes. I don't see their attitudes changing anytime soon..
- blitz_skull 5y ago
  25 here. Got rid of FB about 5 years ago. Never looked back. Never been happier. It’s actually cancer for your mental health.
newaccount2021 5y ago
AOL never had the reach of Facebook, even adjusted for era, population, anything really. HN has been predicting Facebook's demise for years, and it keeps getting bigger, making more money, etc etc. Despite what you might think, Facebook isn't a giant Nuremburg Rally that will impale itself on race hate and political polarization...that's just the twisted worldview you're imposing on it.
mclightning 5y ago
Do not delete your Facebook. Delete your friends, delete your posts using scripts widely available. This is what I did. You will not have any way to "re-activate" it, this way. You will keep your access to fb signin, events and messenger.
- emerged 5y ago
  Can you link to such scripts?
- johntran 5y ago
  Not sure why this is being downvoted. Deleting posts via scripts gave my Facebook a second life. I just use it for messenger and events. Highly recommended.
  - mclightning 5y ago
    Exactly, and I put a cover picture explaining the situation (it is a closed account blabla), so I didn't receive any judgement from friends. Having removed friends, also means I can not go back in a smooth manner. It is a good way to cut yourself off of facebook's network effect without losing access to events, fb signin, messenger.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    If I absolutely wanted to, I could createa second account for that with none of my friends read: um... family, that my first account had on it.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  If I wanted to ever use Facebook again, which I don't. I'd create a new account.
eigengrau5150 5y ago
I've suspected this for a long time. It's just too bad you can have a Facebook account (or for that matter, Twitter or LinkedIn) and still get hired in tech. Having a presence on social media should be treated as the same negative hiring signal as putting an @aol.com email address on your resume.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  HN moment.
  - eigengrau5150 5y ago
    Judging from the downvotes, that take was too much for HN. LOL
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Geez, that article takes its time to get to the point doesn't it, WTF is the detour to Snap! and Friendster for? Skimming the second half it seems the author got lost, he started talking about all the ways Facebook with its terrible anti-consumer actions isn't AOL...
daveslash 5y ago
It seems like I completely mis-remember things... IIRC, in addition to being an "online portal" to online content, it was also an ISP. Back in those days, most internet access was via a Dial-Up modem. If you wanted to get online, your computer had to make a phone call. Where we were, dialing outside of the region defined by our prefix (the 3 numbers after the area code) was considered a "long distance call" and was like 10 cents per minute or something. Connecting to the internet ran up your phone bill ~ fast! if you did not have a LOCAL ISP. IIRC (which is questionable), AOL had toll free numbers, but they'd charge you for your time online - so your internet bill came from your ISP only and not from ISP + Phone Company. Part of AOL's marketing gimmick "first 1,000 hours free!" or some such amount of time to get you to sign up. This was nearly 30 years ago, and I didn't really understand how it all worked back then, and my parents paid the phone bills (not me!) so my recollection may be full of partial-truths or downright falsehoods. But point being - I think the article really understates AOL's role in being an ISP (especially for rural folks who didn't have local ISPs).
- jaredsohn 5y ago
  That matches my experience. We were limited by the number of hours for our local ISP, too. Think they even had different plans for how many hours per month we wanted.
- magila 5y ago
  Large dial-up ISPs had huge lists of numbers you could use to dial in with so that you could pick the one which was local to you. I'm not sure how this worked on the provider side, but customers pretty much never payed by-the-minute fees to dial into their ISP.
tpae 5y ago
... says zdnet
fourseventy 5y ago
I stopped reading at "a software program called TCP/IP"
stevenalowe 5y ago
from Futurama season two: "Good news everyone! Several years ago I tried to log on to AOL, and it just went through! Wheee! We're online!" ―Farnsworth 'bout sums up my AOL days
jimmySixDOF 5y ago
All this talk about Facebook without mentioning their huge investment in FB Reality Labs (FBRL) and the statements from Mark that he will turn them into a "Metaverse" company in 5 years. Now, will they be "the AOL of" this Metaverse is still to be determined but FB are pulling XR out from the tech fringes into a mainstream audience. Apple may well be making similar moves if rumors are to be taken seriously. As far as the Metaverse is concerned, we are still in the late DARPA-NET or early BBS days so while this title may hold true, it would be for reasons that are unintended by the author or those commenting here so far.
- noobquestion81 5y ago
  I’ll believe Mark when it happens. In 2017 he also said he’d ship a billion oculuses; I think they sell maybe 3M a year. My 2c; I did see their remote work demo and thought it was kind of cool, although (anecdotally) coding in a virtual screen tends to give me headaches. But until the headsets arent heavy, expensive, and silly-looking or require goofy paddles I do not think the VR metaverse will be gaining any mass traction. Personally I have found current VR is fun for some games and tedious for everything else. The wow factor of a large expensive facial protrusion with a screen and gyro was gone by the time Oculus was acquired. What followed was a lowering of price, allowing for 4-5x more users per year to be disappointed. And Facebook has more or less failed at all their hw offerings thus far despite much PR, right? I dont see that changing. They should stick to monetizing your information IMO, they’ve been able to make that highly efficient and it doesn’t cost $800 for the end user or leave large imprints on their faces.
deleted 5y ago
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empressplay 5y ago
This article is sadly lacking in historical accuracy. AOL grew out of Quantum Link which definitely predated the Internet. In its heyday it provided far more utility than the Internet of the time. This is a terrible comparison.
kazinator 5y ago
> Facebook Is the AOL of 2021 Thanks ZDNet; that's the most succinct explanation I've ever read for why I've never had a Facebook account.
etempleton 5y ago
Yahoo is perhaps more apt of a comparison: They do not offer anything that is not easily replaceable, they fail to innovate at every turn, and their revenue is almost completely tied to advertising. You might say this describes Google as well, but search provides a real utility and I honestly don’t know what Facebook provides anyone other than an addicting experience that makes the user feel actively worse.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  There was a time in the late 1990s when Yahoo News seemed to be a top performer in terms of republishing or carrying wire stories. They lost an opportunity to redesign the media landscape, something nobody has still been able to do decades later. Ask a random person where they get their news today. Prepare for some strange looks and answers.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Google search was good 15 years ago, when SEO wasn't as much of a thing as it is today. Now it's pretty much errelevant.
cat199 5y ago
s/2021/2004/g
lkrubner 5y ago
About this: "The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL. Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision." Okay, but the tone is critical, so let's ask the question, if this limited vision is somehow a bad thing, why have we seen it for 30 years? If it was there at the beginning of the Web, and it is here now that the Web is mature, then there must be something compelling about "this limited vision." Keep in mind, I was a huge fan of the original blogosphere of 2000-2008, and I was sad when it was killed off with the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. My first startup, from 2002-2008, was originally focused on weblog tools, before we moved onto ecommerce tools. But, again, the question needs to be faced, why did people find Facebook more interesting that the blogosphere, and why did decentralized attempts at social networks (such as FOAF, Friend Of A Friend) fail to take off, despite a lot of hype from all the major dev personalities? Merely whining about the way the world is doesn't really help anyone. Instead of complaining about "this limited vision" it would be helpful to see more essays about why, exactly, people continue to choose limited walled-gardens. Why don't more people want to see some wider vision fulfilled? Why don't more people explore more widely? Why don't more people take out there wallet and spend more money for the kind of independent content that, in theory, they might want to see?
- noobquestion81 5y ago
  I suspect because almost no one wants to be a “gardener” of microblog/message/talk/email, and most do not know how. They just want to follow and talk to people. FB solves all of these with one signup, as did myspace. I also expect gaining traction for decentralized networks is by definition harder as the brand has fragmented.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Honestly there are a lot more things now that lead me to believe that blogging is on an upswing. There are quite a few newer blog directories I've found recently.
fma 5y ago
Guess I'll add my 2 cents. AOL died to me when I could chat with friends on ICQ and I had free Internet from NetZero, free e-mail from Juno. When everything could be "free" by having ads - why pay for AOL? I do remember too, I got free DSL service AND a free DSL modem via an ad service. It's kinda why good journalism is dying, too. Every time a paywall article is posted here people are up in arms or post a free version. Then, we have articles from zdnet which is clickbait, people are up in arms.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
As I remember, AOL was a dial-up internet provider. The reason it held up for so long is because large swaths of USA didn't have broadband access up until very recently.
threshold 5y ago
Wrong. The past is not the future. The future is the future. Facebook is Facebook, AOL was AOL.
bob229 5y ago
We can only hope it fails too. Social media is cancer
stjohnswarts 5y ago
This is what people keep telling themselves and yet FB isn't showing any signs of failure or making stupid purchases.
mvkel 5y ago
AOL died because the world went broadband and AOL was dial-up. That's it. That's the only reason. It was pretty good in a lot of other ways, and I'd argue there's still a place for it today. If you think FB is destined for failure because AOL failed, you're crazy. FB is still on the leading-edge of change in this industry (Oculus). There's zero sense of stagnation in that company.
- annadane 5y ago
  Zero sense of stagnation because what they do is actively tricking the user at every turn (lying about Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions, same thing with the Oculus) and users have no choice
hopesthoughts 5y ago
Yeah I would have to agree. I just deleted mine about a week ago. I have absolutely no regrets.

319 points by afrcnc 5y ago

> People even discovered more of the Internet, such as things like "file transfer protocol," where they could get lots of stuff no one had ever seen in the form of files. Programs such as "finger" let a person see who had been online, which, again, blew people's minds. People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. This person's explanation for why AOL died does not match up with my memories. I remember regularly using AOL's built in web browser (which was just a wrapper around IE) to surf the web. The reason my family switched away from AOL was because we could get faster internet through our cable company. It had nothing to do with FTP, fingering, or "discovering the world wide web". > The business people decided that there should be a way to make something like AOL, even though everyone thought Web sites were amazing and didn't want to go back. Again, this just doesn't line-up with how I remember things. I remember people liking the sense of community AOL had (the chats, IMs, forums, etc). It was other factors (faster internet, etc), that led to AOL's downfall.

dumbfounder 5y ago
TIL FTP took down AOL. Did a human actually write that? Wow. AOL died because it was a walled garden filled with manure and very few actual plants.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > a walled garden filled with manure and very few actual plants. Sounds like Facebook in 2021.
  - MBCook 5y ago
    Honestly it was Disneyland compared to FB. Because it was a paid service they tried to keep it clean and nice. It never would have hosted the kind of anti-vax-blow-up-the-government stuff and promoted it as prime content like FB.
    - OzzyB 5y ago
      What you really mean is that it was US centric and wasn't spammed to death by bot networks and state-backed actors that want to sow division. The fact that you had to get the disk and pay with a credit card created one of the best online user experiences we had.
      - jack_pp 5y ago
        That wouldn't stop state backed actors today but I agree with the first paragraph
      - rightbyte 5y ago
        The Internet Boogeyman from Russia and China is a fairy tale to scare kids you know. Wildly exaggerated threat. Bot farms is an ads problem. The feed algorithm that maximize for 'engagement', in the same sense a traffic jam does, is the main culprit. Using Facebook, Instagram now gives you no power over what you see, just faint wishes that Zuckerberg somewhat fulfills every 4th post.
        stjohnswarts 5y ago
        You're wrong. I've checked out many facebook propaganda sources and they are all laughingly obvious that they are state actors OR US internal sources that Facebook could quickly remove with minimal fuss. Yes the English was terrible and the propaganda horribly obvious (yet dumbasses on FB still buy into it or feed the troll). Anyway, FB doesn't want to remove them unless they pop up in mainstream media, otherwise they are very safe because they drive up viewership and commenting and the Zuck loves that.
        rightbyte 5y ago
        Sure, I don't mean it doesn't exist, but that it is just not that impactfull compared to domestic lunatics. I agree FB is very bad at removing syntetic 'content farm' content.
    - RJSquirel 5y ago
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    As much as I despise FB, the Pages, and Groups, are great. I do think Nextdoor will give FB competition though. If they don't buy it up? (I despise Nextdoor. To me it's just people complaining about their neighborhood. Will never understand the guy who sits home, and complains about the car parked on the street, or who's dog deficated on their lawn. That said, I hear strangers taking about the site, and asking for invites. It's privately owned now, but will make a few people billionaires soon.)
    - spideymans 5y ago
      I would love to read into the psychology of these people. You know, the busybody, snitchy neighbour type. The type that scrutinizes a neighbours home improvements for the most trivial of infractions (we don't allow this colour of flower in this HOA!), or who threatens to report people for banal things that aren't even illegal (gasp... someone legally parked on the publicly owned street).
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        There's something called other-directed perfectionism that could be at work. Someone who can't stand to see imperfections around them or tolerate the fact the humans are just imperfect.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    Or 2020, or 2019. Wait, that sounds like Facebook since it's creation.
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  It's the type of myopic perspective that I would expect from a comment here instead.
jamestenglish 5y ago
I had the exact same reaction to reading those lines. Everyone I knew was more than happy to use AOL to surf the World Wide Web it was only when their cost and speed stagnated next to competitors did people jump ship.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  AOL thought they were an ISP, when really they were a media and community company. I was a kid in the 90s, and my friends' parents didn't want them on the broader internet. AOL was considered safe. While they should have leaned into that, they also had an uphill battle - people now paid their cable companies for internet access, and didn't want to pay AOL's (high) prices for access to content.
- outworlder 5y ago
  > Everyone I knew was more than happy to use AOL to surf the World Wide Web Which was a service AOL didn't really provide at first. Only when it became a kind of ISP.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
Your memory of AOL isn't old enough, then. I remember AOL before they had a web browser, which they later reluctantly added in a bid to keep relevance. You remember the latter days of AOL, when the writing was on the wall.
- patorjk 5y ago
  I setup my own geocities website in 1998, so they had to have had it then. According to the document here [1], AOL's web browser was introduced in 1995. [1] https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/2/ https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/2/
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    1998 is the later days of AOL. Its heyday was 1991-1995, when basically everybody got multiple AOL disks in the mail, you'd have TV advertisements telling you to visit a certain AOL keyword, and they were basically the only user-friendly way of getting online. (The competition like Prodigy or Compuserve had very clunky user interfaces, and GEnie and BBSes were text-only.) The writing was on the wall for AOL as soon as Netscape and Yahoo came out in 1994.
    - trainsplanes 5y ago
      Feels strange to say 1991 was the heyday. I don't know of a single person with a home PC in 1991, much less internet. Mid-90s to very early 2000s was nonstop AOL commercials and CDs in the mail. Chat rooms were booming and you couldn't watch a single TV show without a "You've got mail!" reference.
      - kevinventullo 5y ago
        To bolster your point, the movie “You’ve Got Mail” released in December 1998.
      - nostrademons 5y ago
        "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." -- William Gibson. I was the last of my friends in elementary school to get a computer - my first was a Mac LC in 1991. Where I was, they were rare in 1986 but ubiquitous by about 1989. Would go over to friends' houses to play Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, or Number Munchers. I was on the WWW by 1994. Grew up in suburban Boston, so the area was relatively affluent and educated. I suspect this is like how my 3-year-old (growing up in Silicon Valley) thinks that robots, self-driving cars, and drones are just an ordinary part of reality, while they remain science-fiction for many Americans.
markandrewj 5y ago
I find many of the articles on ZDNet, and CNET, are either inaccurate, fluff, or clickbait.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Especially CNET these days, wow!! They used to write good articles like 10 years ago. Not anymore!!
taf2 5y ago
Exactly, AOL failed to move on broadband because the subscription model they had with dial up internet was very profitable. Additionally, the cable companies realizing the opportunity were not about to let AOL to continue to collect rent over their wires... Facebook is very different from AOL.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  AOL is the reason I got broadband. I tried to cancel and they gave me 6 free months of high-speed to stay with them, with a recurring rate that was $10 more than the provider who delivered the high-speed to my house. After the 6 months was up, I cancelled AOL and stayed with the provider.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Though what allowed cable/DSL companies to move into the ISP business was the complete decoupling of content from access. In 1991, when there was no practical WWW and you navigated a bunch of proprietary content by typing in AOL keywords, a cable company would've had to implement a full graphical browser and a large library of content to be useful. By 1998, when we had Netscape and IE and Yahoo and millions of websites, those industries were all disaggregated and we just needed the pipes. There's a lesson in unbundling here, but it probably doesn't apply to Facebookin quite the manner the author intends.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  I suspect the problem is that they had no infrastructure to sell. They should have been doing co-branded offerings fulfilled by local telecoms. Once people are calling to say "I called the local telecom and ordered DSL/Cable direct, close my account", they're trying to negotiate customer retention from the back foot. I know plenty of people held onto AOL for a long time because of specific communities-- their chat service was more accessible than IRC, and as mentioned elsewhere, tying it to a bill and an identity was a good way to keep it from getting too toxic. My family held out until 2006 or so because of one such community. We were willing to put up with 56k slowness until I got a webdev position and needed the ability to do work-from-home with a reasonable turnaround. There was a definite point though where you could tell they had decided to give up on investment. The client was ever buggier and weirder, they stopped offering Usenet, and their internal forum system got retooled in a way that nobody really liked. I suspect at the end, the chat service was probably their last moat for their userbase.
madrox 5y ago
And the price. AOL charged by the minute and were slow to switch to unlimited...much like Blockbuster was reluctant to kill late fees and ended up losing to Netflix's DVD distribution (even before they got into streaming).
- takeda 5y ago
  I guess that was motivator to look for alternatives. I found it funny when people started switching to broadband and AOL still somehow convinced them they'll need to pay them.
ssharp 5y ago
I grew up on AOL's internet and it really wasn't that bad. The WWW was a lot different back then. Remember, this was even before Google! The article acts like AOL was some wasteland that the company never bothered to update. AOL offered a lot of content, games, file sharing, chat, message boards, email, etc. that was difficult to get elsewhere for most people. Our family (myself included) liked AOL enough that we continued to pay a reduced monthly fee to connect to their service over TCP/IP when the local ISP's started offering better connection options.
- Alex3917 5y ago
  > I grew up on AOL's internet and it really wasn't that bad. It was down for a couple hours per day almost every single day during the few years when they were in hyper growth. But the actual service itself was pretty great when it worked.
  - TuringNYC 5y ago
    Funny story - they switched to an Unlimited hours policy (slowly creeping up from several hours over time.) As a result people just dialed up for long periods of time and made lines busy. It had a second effect - it was busy so often, that once you dialed in it was in your best interest not to dial out...because who knows when you could get back in. Thus the congestion intensified. On top of that, there were programs like A-O-Hell which let people circumvent payment (and it seemed AOL liked it because who knows what metrics were lifted as a result). So you had even more users on the system, again with no incentive to use the system less.
    - spideymans 5y ago
      >On top of that, there were programs like A-O-Hell which let people circumvent payment Looked up AOHell on Wikipedia and landed on this interesting tidbit: >Most notably, the program included a function for stealing the passwords of America Online users and, according to its creator, contains the first recorded mention of the term "phishing"
sammalloy 5y ago
> The reason my family switched away from AOL was because we could get faster internet through our cable company. This is exactly the reason AOL went away. People initially switched to ISPs, then to local telecoms, then to cable providers.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Yea, but their site was never very good? Even at the time, I felt they didn't quite know what do with their group site. Every few months/years, I would check back, and still found the site the same.
empressplay 5y ago
Eventually the replication of free versions of AOL's services on the broader Internet devalued its offering to the point that once standalone Internet connections were cheaper and more broadly available (especially things like NetZero) people simply dumped their AOL subscriptions or never subscribed in the first place. What this has to do with Facebook I do not know -- for what Facebook does, centralization is a feature and not a bug. I do wish the author had at least read the Wikipedia page on AOL before writing their piece though, although it probably would have invalidated their premise.
jdkee 5y ago
And then came the Eternal September. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written. I think it will be harder to unseat Facebook than it was for AOL simply because of size. At its peak, AOL had around 34 million subscribers. Thus you could easily grow and build by service by appealing to people who had never been on AOL and who we’re not enmeshed in the AOL ecosystem. Facebook has billions of users. There aren’t enough people in the world who have Internet access to allow someone to build a massive service out of people who have never been on Facebook. Add to that Instagram and WhatsApp and there are not that many people who are on the Internet but not a part of Facebook’s ecosystem.

adventured 5y ago
Facebook doesn't get unseated, it splinters, losing potency gradually (assuming regulators keep them from buying the competition). Facebook will still be the dominate global social network 10-20 years from now. What will change is that there will be more niche social networks with approaches/audiences/subjects-of-focus that Facebook couldn't cater to well enough (which is why Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Imgur exist).
hopesthoughts 5y ago
Well I'm not anymore. I've never used Whats app and have absolutely no need for Instagram. I was on Facebook itself until I couldn't stand it.

djhworld 5y ago

A lot of people I know have online lives that live within or around facebook and nothing else. They get their news from facebook as the news/media organisation posts updates to their feeds, which they can share with others via WhatsApp or messenger. No need to visit the news sites it's all there. They get their local second hand marketplace through Facebook Marketplace, no need for eBay et al. They get their local community updates, gossip, business recommendations etc. through Facebook Groups. No need for nextdoor or neighbourhoood specific websites/forums. They can find local businesses through the Facebook as the businesses have a Page that describes what they do, testimonials from previous customers, bit of a social feed to add some personality/'blogging'. Contactable through messenger. The businesses don't need to setup a website, Facebook offers all the tools. You never have to leave, especially on iOS/Android if you use the facebook app. Even links to external sites are rendered in a webview, so no need to look at URLs.

function_seven 5y ago
I've been dragged into Instagram. For months now I've been searching for some good used furniture. Mostly MCM stuff. I'd prefer private party sales, but am open to dealers as well. For the personal side I was checking Nextdoor, Craigslist, and OfferUp. Hours of scrolling and modifying search queries and I couldn't find anything worth checking out. Those sites are for $50 couches and $20 bookshelves. For the dealer side, I was just searching the web. My impression was that furniture dealers were either a dying business, or all search engines suck. The only results I kept getting were Pinterest, 1stdibs, or Chairish. These are sites with insane markups where (I suspect) you're supposed to be smart enough to haggle down. I gather they also take a large cut, so not many dealers list with them at all. I finally got a clue and re-animated my ancient IG account. Whaddayaknow? That's where everyone is! Suddenly I've found and followed a couple dozen resale shops that offer all sorts of cool stuff. All within an hour of where I live. Half the time, the URL they have in their bio is a dead website. Or, it exists but hasn't been updated in months. They've given up on having their own website and sell only inside the walled garden now. It's a shame. I still haven't logged into Facebook proper. I probably should find out if Marketplace is better than Craigslist, et. al. for classified ads.
- 5y ago

bastardoperator 5y ago

My personal take. AOL died when private rooms stopped being private and the personal filing cabinet (unlimited storage) was discontinued. AOL easily had the biggest warez scene, once that was over and nobody could share files they went elsewhere.

silisili 5y ago
I think it started when broadband started rolling out nationally in the late 90s. My whole neighborhood for example was on dialup, everyone used AOL(for the most part), and just like that, it was gone once @home rolled fiber optics. AOL didn't seem to have any plan for that. Our family actually wanted to keep AOL, but they still wanted their 24.99 or whatever for the privilege, and well, few people found it worth it.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Yep. Basically this. Everything else is silly speculation. Download speeds went from agonizing, even for the time!, to eye watering fast. I remember downloading 300MB in roughly 30 minutes to an hour back then. To me that was absolutely incredible. And it was! For the time. Whatever AOL was doing back then was irrelevant. Warez moved from place to place. People knew this and responded to the changes over the years as things naturally evolved.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Yeah, it completely changed how the internet and computers in general were used. Early advertising was 'look how quick it is, youll save so much time.' But that turned into 'hey this doesn't suck, I'll spend more time online!' The biggest change for me, personally, was going from an HPB to an LPB. That brings back old memories. Does that terminology even exist anymore?
    - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
      We've lost a lot of cool acronyms and initialisms over the years, and I've seen others paired down, but I think we lost HPB and LPB for sure.

ElijahLynn 5y ago

Ahh, I was thinking MySpace...

nemo44x 5y ago

My mom discovered Facebook last weekend and opened an account and is trying to figure out how to use it. I considered opening a short position in FB today.

hopesthoughts 5y ago
The day my mom joined Twitter, I freaked out!! Well she never was on Twitter, Twitter just said she was.

dheera 5y ago

The biggest turnoff about AOL to me is that I wanted the internet to be a world thing not an America thing.

kube-system 5y ago
Most ISPs operate in a specific area, even today.
- dheera 5y ago
  Sure, but that's usually a logistical limitation, not that you're supporting only having that specific area online. Also in general the word "America" turns me off unless used to refer to the entirety of North and South America, and wreaks of US-centric view of the world. United States of America (USA) != America
  - adventured 5y ago
    America == The United States of America The opening line on Wikipedia: "The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America" Even the French and German wikis say the same thing. Why? Because America is a near universally understood abbreviation of The United States of America. Logical brevity is all that's about. No other nation on the planet has "America" in its name, which is just one more reason why there's so little confusion about which nation is being referred to and why it's obviously a trivial matter. It has been a widely understood name for the US for two centuries. It has been in wide use since long before the US was a globally relevant or powerful nation, which entirely invalidates your notion that it somehow relates to a US-centric view of the world. The people of the US are very commonly known as Americans, not USians or United Statesians. North America is a continent. South America is a continent. America is the abbreviated name for a country. It's not complicated to differentiate.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago

7thaccount 5y ago

I left Facebook years ago and have no reason to go back. I can share photos and videos with friends and family easily enough. Most of the online relationships were pretty superficial as well, so I don't need them anyway. Facebook does have some value, but it seems like the signal to noise ratio is very low. I'm not sure how rare my case is though. How many people in there 20-40s feel the same?

warp 5y ago
Here in Ecuador most of my immediate friends and family have moved to sharing photos and videos in private whatsapp groups. So they've moved away from Facebook the product, but not Facebook the company.
matt_s 5y ago
I mostly use it for family that is on there. The "feed" is horrible, filled with ads and timely things always appear out of order. Stuff from neighborhood sometimes shows something from 3 days after something occurred higher than something today.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Yeah I don't know how people get their news this way... It drives me insane that it'll consistently show me weather from 4 days ago but not today. NOT USEFUL.
dummydata 5y ago
I feel the same. Most my friends just use Instagram (for memes mostly). I like using just Snapchat for sharing photos with my close friends, which is better than sharing with literally everyone. Of course, you still have people who's primary motive is to farm for likes. I don't see their attitudes changing anytime soon..
blitz_skull 5y ago
25 here. Got rid of FB about 5 years ago. Never looked back. Never been happier. It’s actually cancer for your mental health.

newaccount2021 5y ago

AOL never had the reach of Facebook, even adjusted for era, population, anything really. HN has been predicting Facebook's demise for years, and it keeps getting bigger, making more money, etc etc. Despite what you might think, Facebook isn't a giant Nuremburg Rally that will impale itself on race hate and political polarization...that's just the twisted worldview you're imposing on it.

mclightning 5y ago

Do not delete your Facebook. Delete your friends, delete your posts using scripts widely available. This is what I did. You will not have any way to "re-activate" it, this way. You will keep your access to fb signin, events and messenger.

emerged 5y ago
Can you link to such scripts?
johntran 5y ago
Not sure why this is being downvoted. Deleting posts via scripts gave my Facebook a second life. I just use it for messenger and events. Highly recommended.
- mclightning 5y ago
  Exactly, and I put a cover picture explaining the situation (it is a closed account blabla), so I didn't receive any judgement from friends. Having removed friends, also means I can not go back in a smooth manner. It is a good way to cut yourself off of facebook's network effect without losing access to events, fb signin, messenger.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  If I absolutely wanted to, I could createa second account for that with none of my friends read: um... family, that my first account had on it.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
If I wanted to ever use Facebook again, which I don't. I'd create a new account.

eigengrau5150 5y ago

I've suspected this for a long time. It's just too bad you can have a Facebook account (or for that matter, Twitter or LinkedIn) and still get hired in tech. Having a presence on social media should be treated as the same negative hiring signal as putting an @aol.com email address on your resume.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
seattle_spring 5y ago
HN moment.
- eigengrau5150 5y ago
  Judging from the downvotes, that take was too much for HN. LOL

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

Geez, that article takes its time to get to the point doesn't it, WTF is the detour to Snap! and Friendster for? Skimming the second half it seems the author got lost, he started talking about all the ways Facebook with its terrible anti-consumer actions isn't AOL...

daveslash 5y ago

It seems like I completely mis-remember things... IIRC, in addition to being an "online portal" to online content, it was also an ISP. Back in those days, most internet access was via a Dial-Up modem. If you wanted to get online, your computer had to make a phone call. Where we were, dialing outside of the region defined by our prefix (the 3 numbers after the area code) was considered a "long distance call" and was like 10 cents per minute or something. Connecting to the internet ran up your phone bill ~ fast! if you did not have a LOCAL ISP. IIRC (which is questionable), AOL had toll free numbers, but they'd charge you for your time online - so your internet bill came from your ISP only and not from ISP + Phone Company. Part of AOL's marketing gimmick "first 1,000 hours free!" or some such amount of time to get you to sign up. This was nearly 30 years ago, and I didn't really understand how it all worked back then, and my parents paid the phone bills (not me!) so my recollection may be full of partial-truths or downright falsehoods. But point being - I think the article really understates AOL's role in being an ISP (especially for rural folks who didn't have local ISPs).

jaredsohn 5y ago
That matches my experience. We were limited by the number of hours for our local ISP, too. Think they even had different plans for how many hours per month we wanted.
magila 5y ago
Large dial-up ISPs had huge lists of numbers you could use to dial in with so that you could pick the one which was local to you. I'm not sure how this worked on the provider side, but customers pretty much never payed by-the-minute fees to dial into their ISP.

tpae 5y ago

... says zdnet

fourseventy 5y ago

I stopped reading at "a software program called TCP/IP"

stevenalowe 5y ago

from Futurama season two: "Good news everyone! Several years ago I tried to log on to AOL, and it just went through! Wheee! We're online!" ―Farnsworth 'bout sums up my AOL days

jimmySixDOF 5y ago

All this talk about Facebook without mentioning their huge investment in FB Reality Labs (FBRL) and the statements from Mark that he will turn them into a "Metaverse" company in 5 years. Now, will they be "the AOL of" this Metaverse is still to be determined but FB are pulling XR out from the tech fringes into a mainstream audience. Apple may well be making similar moves if rumors are to be taken seriously. As far as the Metaverse is concerned, we are still in the late DARPA-NET or early BBS days so while this title may hold true, it would be for reasons that are unintended by the author or those commenting here so far.

noobquestion81 5y ago
I’ll believe Mark when it happens. In 2017 he also said he’d ship a billion oculuses; I think they sell maybe 3M a year. My 2c; I did see their remote work demo and thought it was kind of cool, although (anecdotally) coding in a virtual screen tends to give me headaches. But until the headsets arent heavy, expensive, and silly-looking or require goofy paddles I do not think the VR metaverse will be gaining any mass traction. Personally I have found current VR is fun for some games and tedious for everything else. The wow factor of a large expensive facial protrusion with a screen and gyro was gone by the time Oculus was acquired. What followed was a lowering of price, allowing for 4-5x more users per year to be disappointed. And Facebook has more or less failed at all their hw offerings thus far despite much PR, right? I dont see that changing. They should stick to monetizing your information IMO, they’ve been able to make that highly efficient and it doesn’t cost $800 for the end user or leave large imprints on their faces.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

empressplay 5y ago

This article is sadly lacking in historical accuracy. AOL grew out of Quantum Link which definitely predated the Internet. In its heyday it provided far more utility than the Internet of the time. This is a terrible comparison.

kazinator 5y ago

> Facebook Is the AOL of 2021 Thanks ZDNet; that's the most succinct explanation I've ever read for why I've never had a Facebook account.

etempleton 5y ago

Yahoo is perhaps more apt of a comparison: They do not offer anything that is not easily replaceable, they fail to innovate at every turn, and their revenue is almost completely tied to advertising. You might say this describes Google as well, but search provides a real utility and I honestly don’t know what Facebook provides anyone other than an addicting experience that makes the user feel actively worse.

sammalloy 5y ago
There was a time in the late 1990s when Yahoo News seemed to be a top performer in terms of republishing or carrying wire stories. They lost an opportunity to redesign the media landscape, something nobody has still been able to do decades later. Ask a random person where they get their news today. Prepare for some strange looks and answers.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
Google search was good 15 years ago, when SEO wasn't as much of a thing as it is today. Now it's pretty much errelevant.

cat199 5y ago

s/2021/2004/g

lkrubner 5y ago

About this: "The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL. Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision." Okay, but the tone is critical, so let's ask the question, if this limited vision is somehow a bad thing, why have we seen it for 30 years? If it was there at the beginning of the Web, and it is here now that the Web is mature, then there must be something compelling about "this limited vision." Keep in mind, I was a huge fan of the original blogosphere of 2000-2008, and I was sad when it was killed off with the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. My first startup, from 2002-2008, was originally focused on weblog tools, before we moved onto ecommerce tools. But, again, the question needs to be faced, why did people find Facebook more interesting that the blogosphere, and why did decentralized attempts at social networks (such as FOAF, Friend Of A Friend) fail to take off, despite a lot of hype from all the major dev personalities? Merely whining about the way the world is doesn't really help anyone. Instead of complaining about "this limited vision" it would be helpful to see more essays about why, exactly, people continue to choose limited walled-gardens. Why don't more people want to see some wider vision fulfilled? Why don't more people explore more widely? Why don't more people take out there wallet and spend more money for the kind of independent content that, in theory, they might want to see?

noobquestion81 5y ago
I suspect because almost no one wants to be a “gardener” of microblog/message/talk/email, and most do not know how. They just want to follow and talk to people. FB solves all of these with one signup, as did myspace. I also expect gaining traction for decentralized networks is by definition harder as the brand has fragmented.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
Honestly there are a lot more things now that lead me to believe that blogging is on an upswing. There are quite a few newer blog directories I've found recently.

fma 5y ago

Guess I'll add my 2 cents. AOL died to me when I could chat with friends on ICQ and I had free Internet from NetZero, free e-mail from Juno. When everything could be "free" by having ads - why pay for AOL? I do remember too, I got free DSL service AND a free DSL modem via an ad service. It's kinda why good journalism is dying, too. Every time a paywall article is posted here people are up in arms or post a free version. Then, we have articles from zdnet which is clickbait, people are up in arms.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

As I remember, AOL was a dial-up internet provider. The reason it held up for so long is because large swaths of USA didn't have broadband access up until very recently.

threshold 5y ago

Wrong. The past is not the future. The future is the future. Facebook is Facebook, AOL was AOL.

bob229 5y ago

We can only hope it fails too. Social media is cancer

stjohnswarts 5y ago

This is what people keep telling themselves and yet FB isn't showing any signs of failure or making stupid purchases.

mvkel 5y ago

AOL died because the world went broadband and AOL was dial-up. That's it. That's the only reason. It was pretty good in a lot of other ways, and I'd argue there's still a place for it today. If you think FB is destined for failure because AOL failed, you're crazy. FB is still on the leading-edge of change in this industry (Oculus). There's zero sense of stagnation in that company.

annadane 5y ago
Zero sense of stagnation because what they do is actively tricking the user at every turn (lying about Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions, same thing with the Oculus) and users have no choice

hopesthoughts 5y ago

Yeah I would have to agree. I just deleted mine about a week ago. I have absolutely no regrets.