7 ms·

> 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

> 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

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