11 ms·
It's been so long since a company reached Facebook's heights and fell that a whole generation doesn't know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time:
by mkr-hn 5y ago
It's been so long since a company reached Facebook's heights and fell that a whole generation doesn't know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels. Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarked on or unnoticed by most people. Until it changed. AOL is around, as Facebook likely will be, but it'll see a similar fall, and no one will see it coming.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110124001004/http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/14/us/america-online-is-facing-challenge-over-free-labor.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110124001004/http://www.nytime...
Note how similar this is to the reports on what Facebook moderators deal with.
- SQueeeeeL 5y agoWait, why was AOL a default ban on game servers? Can someone elaborate?
- mkr-hn 5y agoAOL was the Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Some admins of private servers blocked its IPs for the same reason IRC mods did. AOL got ordinary people on to the internet, so they were a poorer fit for any existing community on average.
- theknocker 5y agoIf only we could somehow do that with Reddit now.
- mcguire 5y agoOnce upon a time, cs.utexas.edu ran a well-known email-to-news (i.e. NNTP, Usenet) gateway. After some problems, AOL's admins asked the person who ran it to block AOL email addresses. Yeah, this was years ago. Some time later, a person who had an AOL email account (who some of you might recognize, so I won't name names even though I'm dying to) contacted the sysadmins, complaining that the email-to-news gateway wasn't working. When she learned that AOL addresses were blocked, she threw a tantrum, threatened to contact various newspapers, complained about UT blocking public access to things paid for by public money, and so on. As a result, the mail-to-news gateway was shut down. That's my AOL story.
- politician 5y agoThere used to be tons of hacking tools for AOL, so I could see how IRC admins would just default ban connections from them to prevent hordes of script kiddies from attempting to cause chaos on networks they really didn't know anything about.
- AzzieElbab 5y agobut that is exactly why fb is getting targeted by media and politicians so much. It is more popular with older people who also happen to be active voters and news consumers.
- seneca 5y agoYep, exactly. The key question is to ask why this stream of concerted effort is pointed at taking down Favebook, and Twitter is left alone.
- LordHumungous 5y agoTwitter amplifies the voices of the "right" type of person: celebrities, journalists, those verified by blue check.
- ethbr0 5y agoBecause Twitter isn't as wide as Facebook (in number of products), and because its primary features aren't as algorithmically tweaked?
- quickthrowman 5y agoIt’s quite simple really, journalists use Twitter.
- AzzieElbab 5y agoIf these hearings produce regulations fb won’t be the only one.
- JohnBooty 5y agoFB's emphasis on family connections makes it much more... potent, and almost cult-like in some ways. Families stay in touch and plan events on FB. Your mom, aunt, and uncle-in-law are rather likely to be on FB, but not Twitter. If they are on Twitter, Twitter doesn't hector you to "connect" with them with nearly the same fervor as FB. That has somewhat profound implications. If one ditches FB, one loses access to your family to some small or large extent. On the mild end of things you miss out on baby pictures and invitations to picnics. On the more distressing side of things, unfriending a family member or leaving FB altogether may be seen as a rejection of parts or all of the family. Perhaps this doesn't apply to your family, but we can agree it applies to many. The "family" aspect of FB also makes it much more of a fertile breeding ground for misinformation relative to Twitter. The boomers using FB are (on average) much less tech-savvy and don't know how to verify claims. But, as your neighbor/uncle/mom/dad/whatever, they are much harder to ignore than some Twitter rando.
- ethbr0 5y agoI'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's future. AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation. And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most network/platform component of AOL. So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it look like? Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger cohorts as key to their survival, but I don't see any realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40 years.
- JohnBooty 5y agoUsers would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own. But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise. History tells us that something eventually will replace it. But, it's hard to imagine.
- wayoutthere 5y ago> But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise. That used to be a fear of mine, but after deleting my account I’ve found it to be a core feature. It forces me to be intentional with my relationships; if I want to stay in touch with someone I have to make the effort. Otherwise, the relationship is likely more parasocial than actively rewarding, and I’m consciously ok focusing my energies on the people I currently want in my life to the exclusion of those relationships that have slipped into parasocial territory.
- baby 5y ago
- whatshisface 5y agoEveryone keeps leaving Instagram out of the discussion. I wonder why?
- moritonal 5y agoBecause it's Facebooks horcrux and no-one wants to admit it.
- 0x964 5y agoI love this comment
- rStar 5y agopeople are over facebook and instagram is flagging also. tick tock isn’t the end either. who’s next?
- mkr-hn 5y agoAOL had lots of well-liked properties, too. The same shifts that knocked AOL down also took those down.
- technick 5y agoI remember being kicked from the #cdc irc channel by default when joining from aol dialup accounts.