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.
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.
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.
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"
That lasted for about a year, until one day my family got a visit from the local police and some government spooks who wanted to know “how did you get these account details?”
Dad was furious. Wouldn’t let me around a computer until high school came along.
Sounds like Facebook in 2021.
It never would have hosted the kind of anti-vax-blow-up-the-government stuff and promoted it as prime content like FB.
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.
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.
The most popular content on the service was astrology horoscopes.
Except for the "Eternal September" part of the park.
It resulted in the Web suddenly becoming open, and full of ill-informed opinions, and populated by large crowds of ignorant, obnoxious, know-nothing users, wearing cargo shorts, Hawai'ian shirts, and socks and sandals, wandering around, pawing all the exhibits.
The September That Never Ended was Good.
That's when the real money started to hit the Internet.
All those Teslas that average-level programmers are driving around, these days, are because of all those "tourists," and their loud shirts.
It was just the "exotic" opinion of some anonymous user on the internet you will very likely never meet in real life. Crazy and colorful opinions made a lot of places interesting in the first place, meeting people completely different from yourself or similar to you in ways you could't or didn't want to share with close friends.
The demand that everything wrong should be purged from the internet is fairly recent. Today users demand conformity like they demand it from their TV and newspaper.
I am average programmer, but not SV. I still haven't been paid well enough to buy a Tesla.
Disneyland has been operating for 70 something years and there are still thousands if not millions of first timers arriving every year.
Try that kind of curation and moderation in an online forum for people that size and within a week you'd have the right wing yelling about "cancel culture" and GOP senators calling hearings on Big Tech censors.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...
Wikipedia:
> The book emphasizes that Russia must spread anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S...Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms became publishing platforms for active measures (propaganda and disinformation) campaigns to promote Russian-style authoritarianism and diminish the influence of western democracy.
Once these platforms were given this evidence (widely published and released online by the platforms themselves), they took some steps to stop it.
Notable examples include populist movements such as the Trump campaign, state secession movements, white separatist movements, and more recently anti-vax movements. There are many more.
Facebook in particular has failed to stop the spread, and the site is widely considered by most outside experts as "captured" by foreign assets. This is especially true when it comes to QAnon and anti-vax content, which appears to be promulgated to harm western institutions.
In the case of at least one state separatist movement (and at least one white power movement, IIRC), both were revealed to have leaders who traveled back and forth to Russia and/or received funding.
I would also invite you to go back to the origins of the Trump campaign, and see how it evolved. It originally began as an active measure, with the Trump campaign hiring paid actors to promote his campaign announcement. There's a paper trail behind this, and several of his former staffers have come forward recently and admitted it.
You just described US foreign policy in South America and SE Asia.
Somehow people think the United States is too big or too exceptional to be the target of agitprop.
This theory is like a mirror image of what the empire is doing to the world.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-ema...
Further, the successful use of cyberwarfare by Russia, is considered the leading example of its kind.
And I haven't even mentioned Brexit, or hundreds of other campaigns to weaken western democracies.
It's pretty clear that Russia leads in this regard.
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were worthless failures, and resulted in the loss of trillions of US dollars that could have gone to building American infrastructure, funding universal healthcare and education, and improving the lives of average citizens.
These invasions fundamentally weakened the US at home and abroad. They did not serve the interests of "empire" at all.
We seem to be talking about different things.
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.)
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.
There's a lesson in unbundling here, but it probably doesn't apply to Facebookin quite the manner the author intends.
I never understood what they did with all those programmers.
I'm not in favor of hiring a CEO just because they kinda looked good on paper. I won't even mention the person's name, and don't blame it all on that person. Amazon was a slow sinking ship.
After the 6 months was up, I cancelled AOL and stayed with the provider.
Which was a service AOL didn't really provide at first. Only when it became a kind of ISP.
This is exactly the reason AOL went away. People initially switched to ISPs, then to local telecoms, then to cable providers.
Every few months/years, I would check back, and still found the site the same.
[1] https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/2/
The writing was on the wall for AOL as soon as Netscape and Yahoo came out in 1994.
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.
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.
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.
I found it funny when people started switching to broadband and AOL still somehow convinced them they'll need to pay them.
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.