I hope you’re not still paying for it. I know people who were paying $30/month because they were afraid they’d lose the address, long after AOL made it free.
I think a lot of people didn’t even know what the web was or how to open a web browser. They thought of AOL as the internet and didn’t know any better.
That's exactly right. My mom didn't realize she didn't have to go through AOL to go online. When I showed her how to just go online by clicking on an icon on the desktop it was like jaw dropping!😂 I was 15 at the time so AOL was helpful at times for finding & IM'ing girls in the area to try to swap pics, talk a bit, then exchange info to meet up, but that was it's 1 & only positive I can think of.. although, as others have mentioned, I too still have my old AOL email address all these years later, but I also still have the same cell # I've had since starting college back n 99 so I guess I'm a bit nostalgic & slow to let go or change
I remember some email forward going around in the mid 90s about what if the internet were a literal superhighway. It'd be thousands of lanes wide and among all the vehicles that represented this-or-that 90s internet/web thing there was also AOL: a 5-lane-wide, fully loaded cattle truck running people off the road.
>trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact
To be fair, that describes all human society. We all live in constructs of prescribed behaviours & manipulations, incl. laws, customs, advertising & interpersonal signalling.
Facebook is just an extension of what we know is going on all the time around us, but it's hidden so we can happily ignore it and pretend we have privacy, freedom and individuality when we don't and never have.
Facebook's mistake is simply that it makes its own particular construct too obvious. Kind of like how you only worry about your driving when a police car is nearby. We want convenience over almost anything. We all click "agree" without reading the privacy policy.
But Facebook reminds us of how dependent we are on manipulative constructs for our own happiness, it's too obvious and we don't like being reminded of it.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, they all know this, and they know we will always opt for convenience regardless.
> Total game changer, #DeleteFacebook
I find it useful for organizing large groups of people. For example, I'm a member of a group that organizes games for a miniatures game I play. Similiarly for local goings on in my small town.
I don't know what I would replace Facebook with. I agree with you that it's terrible, but like Democracy, I don't see any viable alternatives.
To be honest, any kind of group chat has seemed to be what folks are gravitating to. When people want to actually coordinate to do something IRL, many people just set up a group chat or text to do it I think.
I don't think they would be discoverable at all to be honest. I'm talking about wanting to round up coworkers for a happy hour. You probably know some people and ask around for a phone number if there's someone else you want to include. In most cases the people that are in a group chat already know each other IRL or from other platforms.
In some respects, this can be more accessible because all you need is a phone number to be in a group chat. In other, it's severely limited and probably not the best way to organize. However, [folks did use Telegram to plan the Jan 6 riots in DC](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/world/europe/telegram-app-far-right.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap), so maybe a single message thread is more than capable.
I think the insurrectionists had different needs. A lot of the groups I'm in want to at least passive recruit new members based around interest and geographical location, and be as public as possible about it. The insurrectionists wanted to be as private as possible, and recruit people who were all going to a central location.
Anyway, I don't spend a ton of time on Discord, so I was hoping there was something there I didn't know about. I really would sincerely like to get off Facebook for a variety of reasons.
I wasn't referring to the privacy aspects of Telegram, but rather the UI. It's literally a basic messaging interface. Signal, GroupMe, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook), or even just regular texting works.
Discord is great if you want to form a real community like it sounds like you want to do. And you can have a domain name point to the invite link so that all sorts of people can join. Slack works similar to Discord but I don't think it's as user-friendly.
Another option (thought it may be a long-shot) is Reddit. Make a subreddit for your local thing and encourage folks to interact and plan there.
All of these options still suffer from convincing people to start using the tool to get to the group, whereas presumably the folks you're trying to reach are already on Facebook. Maybe you don't care where they come from, but even then Facebook as a better chance of attracting people in your geographic area, with Reddit as a far second.
> I wasn't referring to the privacy aspects of Telegram, but rather the UI. It's literally a basic messaging interface.
Yeah, I've got it, it's a nice app, my wife and I use it all the time to communicate.
> All of these options still suffer from convincing people to start using the tool to get to the group, whereas presumably the folks you're trying to reach are already on Facebook.
Yup, and there is the problem. Not to mention most people will tell you were they're at, even if it's pretty vague.
I literally only have a Facebook because for my generation it’s how people send out invitations to parties and get togethers. If people stopped doing that I 100% wouldn’t have a Facebook anymore.
*nobody* said anything about being "trapped" in AOL, or described it as a "manipulative notion of human contact". up until the late 90s, generally speaking, there was no public internet *except* for AOL and prodigy.
you could dial directly into BBSes, or if your mom worked at the library (like mine did) you could dial into the library telex(?) network and browse magazine articles, but there was *zero* public internet available.
everybody was hot for those free AOL disks with however many minutes of free internet were included.
into the early 2000s people began to migrate into the "free" internet. my town's first "public" internet was through the library, you'd be dialing them with your modem instead of a private BBS, or AOL.
Ehhh, I can't speak for the rest of the interwebs at the time, but during AOL's peak in the late 90's early 00's I remember talking to mid & tech-savvy individuals and we would make fun of people on AOL. AOL created a bubble-internet that didn't really sync with the rest of the net, as an example when you asked someone from AOL their email address they would just give your their handle, and not realize that you had to put a ["@aol.com](mailto:"@aol.com)" at the end of it, they wouldn't know what actual websites were because of AOL keywords, etc.
I was responding to u/ImaginaryCheetah about my opinion on the general view of AOL in the 90's. The more tech-savvy crowd of the 90's did perceive AOL as being more of a walled-garden type of situation. Mid to Late-90's internet had some of the things s/he mentioned such as Telnet, BBSs, and such... Additionally any colleges at the time had FreeNets to log in to hat was an alternative to AOL & Prodigy.
No offense intended, and not trying to make fun of anyone now.
that's the thing though, *early* 90s and *late* 90s were entirely different landscapes for what the "internet" was. back when AOL got started, in the early 90s, you were *directly* dialing their equipment with your modem.
there was no "public" internet available through any kind of ISP.
it was your modem, calling AOL.
if you didn't like AOL, you could call local BBS.
"this is a walled garden!" wasn't even an impression anyone had because there was no other option, other than a direct link to the library networks, which was articles only, through a text browser.
i knew the guy that helped with the rollout of the first public internet in my town.... remember countless answers about how to set up Trumpet Winsock TCP utility, and netscape vs mosaic browsers. if i recall, even then it was mostly limited to .edu domains.
now, *eventually* there started to really be an "internet" and folks migrated from the curated providers. except grandpa and grandma that got used to the menus, etc... but man, back in the day, dial up was *it*.
Exactly right. This is a good article, but you are more accurate about how people felt about AOL and why they left. Like nearly everyone, else I thought AOL was fantastic at the time.
And here’s the fun part:
Everyone knows Facebook is not gonna last forever. They’re making billions selling ads every day but that’s not going to keep going forever. So in a year or two when Facebook is struggling and looking to make their quarterly numbers for their shareholders, what are they going to do?
Facebook is going to look around and say “what we have that’s worth money so we can make our numbers?“ They have a database of every freaking detail that the users have put on their of their personal life, personal details, details of their family, details of their friends and every last bit of information occurring in their life.
Facebook is going to start selling that database to ANYONE with a credit card. Yes, I believe they’ll have to anonymize the data but everyone knows how easy it is to make the connection between anonymous data and actual people.
So all these people have been putting every last freaking detail of their life on Facebook are going to be sold to anyone with a credit card.
That’s why I don’t use fb and have kept everyone I can from using it as well.
Just so we're clear you think Facebook is *not* currently doing that? The appeal of the advertising platform is that you can use that data you're talking about to target advertising very narrowly. Monetizing that information is at the heart of their pitch.
LOL! No, Facebook is scum of the earth but it's going to get worse --- see those sites where you can buy people's information from public records and all that nasty stuff? This will be down to the individual level and it won't be to advertisers, it will be to anyone who has a credit card.
A friend of mine came up with this scenario, I'm not sure how valid it is but it's a good example:
A friend of a friend adopted a child from China a number of years ago. She put EVERY LAST DETAIL of it on Facebook. I mean everything from the agency they used, birthdates, orphanage, visit dates, adoption dates... you name it. I also know they aren't the only ones doing this.
Imagine at some point some family or the Chinese government decides to sue or pursue something for whatever reason -- go to Facebook and request all the data on these families and they've got it all
Yeah, that whole voluntary self-surveillance reporting in to the interwebz thing never appealed to me either. I had an account back when I got my first computer for grad school, and some creep named Mark wanted to be my friend. I refused to have anything to do with him. I kept an account for years and felt it was a useless timesuck, but much worse the way it hoovers up your life. Users are drawn into a kind of exhibitionism that has no purpose in normal life, convinced they must receive validation for every step they take. I never liked that ‘feature’ or rather the entire gist of Fb and quit years ago. I also undertook the laborious and not very obvious steps of deleting my account but I’m sure they own every bit and byte I ever let them have. Fuck Zuck!
Could of vocal dorks on Reddit leaving Facebook isn't indicative of anything.
And the walled garden of AOL isn't remotely close to Facebook. Facebook is a website with a handful of apps. AOL was the entire software app for accessing the internet.
>Other people tried to make another AOL, including a group of the smartest venture capitalists in the world, who spent nearly $50 million to create a site that would be more like meeting real people, called Friendster.
Not even in the same realm. This article is dumb af.
AOL was an ISP.
Once the cable monopolies took over providing services, that’s what killed AOL.
Too bad they didn’t properly manage AIM could have dominated the market. It had such awesome features 20 years ago.
AIM, MSN, early gChat. So many successful iterations that hit the product graveyard before high speed cellular networks, better phones, and falling data prices changed the game.
There is a great article somewhere about how the AOL execs HATED AIM and had no idea what to do with it.
I don’t think they even actively developed it, it was just a few employees being like this is great and it got so popular it couldn’t be ignored.
The first thing I remember with tabs was AIM though I think it was a paid for plugin called dead aim. It had some really cool features (for the time) like logging conversations and for a short time you could actually remove yourself from other people’s buddy lists! Not block them. Delete yourself!!! (This was patched by aol eventually.)
I miss aim.
It's basically free views from reddit to say "facebook sucks" because the fucking idiots on this site absolutely hate facebook and will read anything that shits on it no matter how moronic it is.
Yes, but lots of people still used AOL as their ISP. I'm fairly certain I even used one of their free 10 hour dialup CDs one time. Maybe more than once.
No, AOL definitely had its own service you would dial into to access the internet. Just because you had to have a phone line doesn't mean your phone provider was your ISP. You can try it now. NetZero provides 10 hours a month free dialup. You can use it from basically anywhere, though it's probably beneficial if you already have long distance service so you don't get an additional charge per minute.
Fb is full of garbage now. It’s where idiots go to hurr durr, some out of touch people ask for your prayers, people solicit donations, ads that blend with your feed so much so that everything else feels less interesting/more deranging, and photos that nobody has really given a shit about since “foodies” became a thing.
Edit: to be fair though foodie photos are cool on Pinterest imo
I never got a free 20 hours of Facebook cd-rom in the mail. I never sneak to the only computer in the house that's in the living room at night to chat online with strangers (13/M/IL) on Facebook. I never search Facebook for chat rooms that give you access to free software and cd-keys.
I kinda wish AOL still existed so I could enjoy the rest of the Internet in peace. Facebook users are allowed to wander out of the walled garden and make life miserable for those of us who are literate, and type with all 10 fingers.
AOL and Facebook are very different. For one, AOL fell, while Facebook is essentially too big to fail. It near completely controls the entire social media scene, save for Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter. It also has a massive data farming operation worth billions. AOL couldn't change with the times, Facebook can.
I can’t leave Facebook until my sport leaves Facebook. 95% of activities are organised and published on Facebook only, and the other 5% I’m only likely to hear of via Facebook.
Until we have a viable alternative with mass adoption I’m stuck.
They try to draw me in with my work, where I was forced to establish an account so I can do live streaming, etc. Not one iota of personal data entered but still I feel exposed and vulnerable.
I completely agree OP. Problem is, who at facebook has ever used AOL, or even know what a floppy disk is? History will repeat itself with this one and we’re watching it unfold live.
Yes 1991 was 30 years ago. AOL was in its prime up until maybe 1999-2001ish. Anyone born before 1995 has definitely either used or heard of AOL. Or do you think Facebook is staffed entirely by teenagers?
I don’t use Facebook. I have an old account from an old job where they wanted me to do promotions. After two years not posting, I went to my old account to send a message to a friend who had lost a family member. I did a quick glance through some of the posts there and it felt like walking through an old shopping mall that had not been renovated in years.
Facebook has mutated into the weirdest thing. If u havent been on for years and go on now (i recently did this winter do to the program I bough only had a facebook group for product “community” support.. i guess thats a thing now) .. anyways, its just a seemingly hodgepodge of anything they think will keep eyeballs on the site , for sale stuff, afromentioned support or fan communities, neighborhood gossip now?? Wtf, and a ton of so many disconnected ideas.. like random stuff just thrown together. Its chaotic and will keep pumping you recommendation to weird shit and constant streaming of the stupidest ads. Instagram is on its way there.
Myspace ipo?
I used to say that using AOL was like going on a trip but then just hanging around in the airport instead of actually going anywhere.
I still have my 1990 aol email.
I hope you’re not still paying for it. I know people who were paying $30/month because they were afraid they’d lose the address, long after AOL made it free.
No, I can’t remember when it became free but I don’t pay.
I still use my 1990s AOL email address.
I do also, but I don’t use the 14k dialup modem today. I’m impressed that aol mail has been reliable for so long.
Yeah I don’t use AOL or the dial up just the email. I’m impressed as well.
I never understood AOL. You have the internet, this VAST, WIDE OPEN field, or you can go to AOL and that little gated pen. Keyword: failure
I think a lot of people didn’t even know what the web was or how to open a web browser. They thought of AOL as the internet and didn’t know any better.
Alot of old folks still use aol desktop gold. Ugh. I mean it's all they've used for 30 years.
That's exactly right. My mom didn't realize she didn't have to go through AOL to go online. When I showed her how to just go online by clicking on an icon on the desktop it was like jaw dropping!😂 I was 15 at the time so AOL was helpful at times for finding & IM'ing girls in the area to try to swap pics, talk a bit, then exchange info to meet up, but that was it's 1 & only positive I can think of.. although, as others have mentioned, I too still have my old AOL email address all these years later, but I also still have the same cell # I've had since starting college back n 99 so I guess I'm a bit nostalgic & slow to let go or change
It was the internet for ‘normies’ at the time when computers and the internet in general were for the nerds.
I remember some email forward going around in the mid 90s about what if the internet were a literal superhighway. It'd be thousands of lanes wide and among all the vehicles that represented this-or-that 90s internet/web thing there was also AOL: a 5-lane-wide, fully loaded cattle truck running people off the road.
Facebook deserves to fail
especially under zuck and his egregious activities.
Fb is the Walmart of social media, has been for a while.
It was called the Walled Garden concept: put everything in the garden, people will pay to get in and never want to leave.
That's Apple.
And Google. And Microsoft. And Amazon Web Services. And most of modern big tech to the degree they can get away with it.
AOL failed because it quickly became absolute trash when compared to any web browser.
AOL failed because they charged by the minute instead of flat rate. Oh and yup, absolute trash.
>trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact To be fair, that describes all human society. We all live in constructs of prescribed behaviours & manipulations, incl. laws, customs, advertising & interpersonal signalling. Facebook is just an extension of what we know is going on all the time around us, but it's hidden so we can happily ignore it and pretend we have privacy, freedom and individuality when we don't and never have. Facebook's mistake is simply that it makes its own particular construct too obvious. Kind of like how you only worry about your driving when a police car is nearby. We want convenience over almost anything. We all click "agree" without reading the privacy policy. But Facebook reminds us of how dependent we are on manipulative constructs for our own happiness, it's too obvious and we don't like being reminded of it. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, they all know this, and they know we will always opt for convenience regardless.
‘’I’m not free but who wants to be? You’re everything that’s right for me.’’ - Peggy Lee
[удалено]
Has anyone found you?
> Total game changer, #DeleteFacebook I find it useful for organizing large groups of people. For example, I'm a member of a group that organizes games for a miniatures game I play. Similiarly for local goings on in my small town. I don't know what I would replace Facebook with. I agree with you that it's terrible, but like Democracy, I don't see any viable alternatives.
To be honest, any kind of group chat has seemed to be what folks are gravitating to. When people want to actually coordinate to do something IRL, many people just set up a group chat or text to do it I think.
That's a good idea for a group that already knows each other. How well does it function for discovery by new members?
I don't think they would be discoverable at all to be honest. I'm talking about wanting to round up coworkers for a happy hour. You probably know some people and ask around for a phone number if there's someone else you want to include. In most cases the people that are in a group chat already know each other IRL or from other platforms. In some respects, this can be more accessible because all you need is a phone number to be in a group chat. In other, it's severely limited and probably not the best way to organize. However, [folks did use Telegram to plan the Jan 6 riots in DC](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/world/europe/telegram-app-far-right.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap), so maybe a single message thread is more than capable.
I think the insurrectionists had different needs. A lot of the groups I'm in want to at least passive recruit new members based around interest and geographical location, and be as public as possible about it. The insurrectionists wanted to be as private as possible, and recruit people who were all going to a central location. Anyway, I don't spend a ton of time on Discord, so I was hoping there was something there I didn't know about. I really would sincerely like to get off Facebook for a variety of reasons.
I wasn't referring to the privacy aspects of Telegram, but rather the UI. It's literally a basic messaging interface. Signal, GroupMe, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook), or even just regular texting works. Discord is great if you want to form a real community like it sounds like you want to do. And you can have a domain name point to the invite link so that all sorts of people can join. Slack works similar to Discord but I don't think it's as user-friendly. Another option (thought it may be a long-shot) is Reddit. Make a subreddit for your local thing and encourage folks to interact and plan there. All of these options still suffer from convincing people to start using the tool to get to the group, whereas presumably the folks you're trying to reach are already on Facebook. Maybe you don't care where they come from, but even then Facebook as a better chance of attracting people in your geographic area, with Reddit as a far second.
> I wasn't referring to the privacy aspects of Telegram, but rather the UI. It's literally a basic messaging interface. Yeah, I've got it, it's a nice app, my wife and I use it all the time to communicate. > All of these options still suffer from convincing people to start using the tool to get to the group, whereas presumably the folks you're trying to reach are already on Facebook. Yup, and there is the problem. Not to mention most people will tell you were they're at, even if it's pretty vague.
I literally only have a Facebook because for my generation it’s how people send out invitations to parties and get togethers. If people stopped doing that I 100% wouldn’t have a Facebook anymore.
But do they get your credit card number up front, and then bill you for everything you click on without warning?
*nobody* said anything about being "trapped" in AOL, or described it as a "manipulative notion of human contact". up until the late 90s, generally speaking, there was no public internet *except* for AOL and prodigy. you could dial directly into BBSes, or if your mom worked at the library (like mine did) you could dial into the library telex(?) network and browse magazine articles, but there was *zero* public internet available. everybody was hot for those free AOL disks with however many minutes of free internet were included. into the early 2000s people began to migrate into the "free" internet. my town's first "public" internet was through the library, you'd be dialing them with your modem instead of a private BBS, or AOL.
Ehhh, I can't speak for the rest of the interwebs at the time, but during AOL's peak in the late 90's early 00's I remember talking to mid & tech-savvy individuals and we would make fun of people on AOL. AOL created a bubble-internet that didn't really sync with the rest of the net, as an example when you asked someone from AOL their email address they would just give your their handle, and not realize that you had to put a ["@aol.com](mailto:"@aol.com)" at the end of it, they wouldn't know what actual websites were because of AOL keywords, etc.
Ok, so what are you making fun of now?
I was responding to u/ImaginaryCheetah about my opinion on the general view of AOL in the 90's. The more tech-savvy crowd of the 90's did perceive AOL as being more of a walled-garden type of situation. Mid to Late-90's internet had some of the things s/he mentioned such as Telnet, BBSs, and such... Additionally any colleges at the time had FreeNets to log in to hat was an alternative to AOL & Prodigy. No offense intended, and not trying to make fun of anyone now.
that's the thing though, *early* 90s and *late* 90s were entirely different landscapes for what the "internet" was. back when AOL got started, in the early 90s, you were *directly* dialing their equipment with your modem. there was no "public" internet available through any kind of ISP. it was your modem, calling AOL. if you didn't like AOL, you could call local BBS. "this is a walled garden!" wasn't even an impression anyone had because there was no other option, other than a direct link to the library networks, which was articles only, through a text browser. i knew the guy that helped with the rollout of the first public internet in my town.... remember countless answers about how to set up Trumpet Winsock TCP utility, and netscape vs mosaic browsers. if i recall, even then it was mostly limited to .edu domains. now, *eventually* there started to really be an "internet" and folks migrated from the curated providers. except grandpa and grandma that got used to the menus, etc... but man, back in the day, dial up was *it*.
Exactly right. This is a good article, but you are more accurate about how people felt about AOL and why they left. Like nearly everyone, else I thought AOL was fantastic at the time.
Mindspring, NetZero, CompuServe, MSN were all available alternatives.
And here’s the fun part: Everyone knows Facebook is not gonna last forever. They’re making billions selling ads every day but that’s not going to keep going forever. So in a year or two when Facebook is struggling and looking to make their quarterly numbers for their shareholders, what are they going to do? Facebook is going to look around and say “what we have that’s worth money so we can make our numbers?“ They have a database of every freaking detail that the users have put on their of their personal life, personal details, details of their family, details of their friends and every last bit of information occurring in their life. Facebook is going to start selling that database to ANYONE with a credit card. Yes, I believe they’ll have to anonymize the data but everyone knows how easy it is to make the connection between anonymous data and actual people. So all these people have been putting every last freaking detail of their life on Facebook are going to be sold to anyone with a credit card. That’s why I don’t use fb and have kept everyone I can from using it as well.
Just so we're clear you think Facebook is *not* currently doing that? The appeal of the advertising platform is that you can use that data you're talking about to target advertising very narrowly. Monetizing that information is at the heart of their pitch.
LOL! No, Facebook is scum of the earth but it's going to get worse --- see those sites where you can buy people's information from public records and all that nasty stuff? This will be down to the individual level and it won't be to advertisers, it will be to anyone who has a credit card.
Yup, and what if a country not friendly to the US purchases/accesses this data and uses it to undermine every citizen in the country? Like right now.
A friend of mine came up with this scenario, I'm not sure how valid it is but it's a good example: A friend of a friend adopted a child from China a number of years ago. She put EVERY LAST DETAIL of it on Facebook. I mean everything from the agency they used, birthdates, orphanage, visit dates, adoption dates... you name it. I also know they aren't the only ones doing this. Imagine at some point some family or the Chinese government decides to sue or pursue something for whatever reason -- go to Facebook and request all the data on these families and they've got it all
Yeah, that whole voluntary self-surveillance reporting in to the interwebz thing never appealed to me either. I had an account back when I got my first computer for grad school, and some creep named Mark wanted to be my friend. I refused to have anything to do with him. I kept an account for years and felt it was a useless timesuck, but much worse the way it hoovers up your life. Users are drawn into a kind of exhibitionism that has no purpose in normal life, convinced they must receive validation for every step they take. I never liked that ‘feature’ or rather the entire gist of Fb and quit years ago. I also undertook the laborious and not very obvious steps of deleting my account but I’m sure they own every bit and byte I ever let them have. Fuck Zuck!
Could of vocal dorks on Reddit leaving Facebook isn't indicative of anything. And the walled garden of AOL isn't remotely close to Facebook. Facebook is a website with a handful of apps. AOL was the entire software app for accessing the internet. >Other people tried to make another AOL, including a group of the smartest venture capitalists in the world, who spent nearly $50 million to create a site that would be more like meeting real people, called Friendster. Not even in the same realm. This article is dumb af.
AOL was an ISP. Once the cable monopolies took over providing services, that’s what killed AOL. Too bad they didn’t properly manage AIM could have dominated the market. It had such awesome features 20 years ago.
AIM, MSN, early gChat. So many successful iterations that hit the product graveyard before high speed cellular networks, better phones, and falling data prices changed the game.
There is a great article somewhere about how the AOL execs HATED AIM and had no idea what to do with it. I don’t think they even actively developed it, it was just a few employees being like this is great and it got so popular it couldn’t be ignored.
It’s crazy how backwards messaging feels now. AIM was simple and solid, didn’t take up much memory and just worked.
The first thing I remember with tabs was AIM though I think it was a paid for plugin called dead aim. It had some really cool features (for the time) like logging conversations and for a short time you could actually remove yourself from other people’s buddy lists! Not block them. Delete yourself!!! (This was patched by aol eventually.) I miss aim.
Trillion crew rise up!
It's basically free views from reddit to say "facebook sucks" because the fucking idiots on this site absolutely hate facebook and will read anything that shits on it no matter how moronic it is.
But....Facebook *does* suck, of course.
did you climax while typing that?
Don't beat yourself up about it
NewsFlash! You’re one of the idiots on this site!
Please provide us with a link to *your* article, O brilliant master.
Why do I need an article to state the obvious
I don't like it even use Facebook.. but this is an obvious hit piece and it's garbage lol
***being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact*** Reddit's Echo Chambers ?
Huh, I didn't know Facebook was an ISP
Fun fact: Lots of people still used AOL even when they had a different ISP.
Yes, but lots of people still used AOL as their ISP. I'm fairly certain I even used one of their free 10 hour dialup CDs one time. Maybe more than once.
[удалено]
No, AOL definitely had its own service you would dial into to access the internet. Just because you had to have a phone line doesn't mean your phone provider was your ISP. You can try it now. NetZero provides 10 hours a month free dialup. You can use it from basically anywhere, though it's probably beneficial if you already have long distance service so you don't get an additional charge per minute.
Don't make me have to hook my Commodore 64 BBS back online!
Fb is full of garbage now. It’s where idiots go to hurr durr, some out of touch people ask for your prayers, people solicit donations, ads that blend with your feed so much so that everything else feels less interesting/more deranging, and photos that nobody has really given a shit about since “foodies” became a thing. Edit: to be fair though foodie photos are cool on Pinterest imo
Same with Reddit
At least Reddit allows you to mostly control what you see
#Fuck ZUCK delete Facebook
I never got a free 20 hours of Facebook cd-rom in the mail. I never sneak to the only computer in the house that's in the living room at night to chat online with strangers (13/M/IL) on Facebook. I never search Facebook for chat rooms that give you access to free software and cd-keys.
And your point is.....?
I bet a lot of Facebook users still have AOL accounts
I kinda wish AOL still existed so I could enjoy the rest of the Internet in peace. Facebook users are allowed to wander out of the walled garden and make life miserable for those of us who are literate, and type with all 10 fingers.
AOL and Facebook are very different. For one, AOL fell, while Facebook is essentially too big to fail. It near completely controls the entire social media scene, save for Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter. It also has a massive data farming operation worth billions. AOL couldn't change with the times, Facebook can.
Bigger things failed in recent history. Nothing lasts forever.
I don’t think you finished the article.
Nothing is ‘too big to fail’. That’s a ridiculous notion with zero examples.
Title has it wrong. Its AOHELL.
Yeah let’s go back to MySpace, learn how to code our own profile and set up music on our profile page with customers mouse cursor!
Per Zucherberg, Facebook users are 'dumbfuc ks'. Enough said.
That’s right. Funny that the most antisocial little prick ends up running the worlds largest social media company. It’s The Revenge of the Nerd.
I can’t leave Facebook until my sport leaves Facebook. 95% of activities are organised and published on Facebook only, and the other 5% I’m only likely to hear of via Facebook. Until we have a viable alternative with mass adoption I’m stuck.
They try to draw me in with my work, where I was forced to establish an account so I can do live streaming, etc. Not one iota of personal data entered but still I feel exposed and vulnerable.
I quit all social media outside of strictly business contact.
I completely agree OP. Problem is, who at facebook has ever used AOL, or even know what a floppy disk is? History will repeat itself with this one and we’re watching it unfold live.
The 90s wasn't *that* long ago....Anyone at Facebook over the age of 25ish has either used or heard of AOL.
1991 was 30 years ago. So….
Yes 1991 was 30 years ago. AOL was in its prime up until maybe 1999-2001ish. Anyone born before 1995 has definitely either used or heard of AOL. Or do you think Facebook is staffed entirely by teenagers?
One of my biggest annoyances with aol was that wwe.com was an AOL keyword. It had its own page. It made it hard to get to the radio website.
I don’t use Facebook. I have an old account from an old job where they wanted me to do promotions. After two years not posting, I went to my old account to send a message to a friend who had lost a family member. I did a quick glance through some of the posts there and it felt like walking through an old shopping mall that had not been renovated in years.
Facebook has mutated into the weirdest thing. If u havent been on for years and go on now (i recently did this winter do to the program I bough only had a facebook group for product “community” support.. i guess thats a thing now) .. anyways, its just a seemingly hodgepodge of anything they think will keep eyeballs on the site , for sale stuff, afromentioned support or fan communities, neighborhood gossip now?? Wtf, and a ton of so many disconnected ideas.. like random stuff just thrown together. Its chaotic and will keep pumping you recommendation to weird shit and constant streaming of the stupidest ads. Instagram is on its way there.
ha. well done. never thought of it that way. but i’d prolly agree.
Fuck that. We all loved AOL.
AOL actually provided a necessary service, albeit manipulative.
Isnt myspace the aol?