Friends don't let friends use AOL (2000)

https://www.salon.com/2000/02/02/aol_friends/

by brod • 8 years ago

44 45 8 years ago

salon.com

rbanffy• 8 years ago

I think it'd be trivial to let a machine rewrite this for Twitter of Facebook (or Reddit).

jlangemeier• 8 years ago

s/AOL/Facebook/gi

bovermyer• 8 years ago

Oh man, Winsock. That takes me back.

harlanji• 8 years ago

Winsock is the first thing I learned that felt legit in some way. Made an IP chat app, 1998 or so. That rush led to at least a million dollars being made... it kept me from smoking pot with the losers. Programming in general was the escape, tho indeed a chat app was a claim to minor fame 10 years later! (Nothing against pot, but in high school that’s pretty much the case).

marzell• 8 years ago

I remember the days of roll-your-own proggies and feeling like we'd hit the saturation point of what we could do within AOL... but then discovering how to replace Winsock32.dll and install Netscape Navigator and starting to learn what the internet really had to offer.

ryandrake• 8 years ago

I remember the exact same “conversion attempts”. In the late 90’s just after getting out of undergrad, I lived in a 55+ seniors community (different story...), and right away I Subscribed to the local cable internet service. Everyone else in the community was on dial-up AOL and I couldn’t understand why. Broadband is so much faster and you get all of the Internet! I even helped a few of them move over to what was then high speed Internet but each and every one of them went back to AOL within a month or so.

You can see the same thing looking at people glued to social media today. Same mentality. I don’t care about Internet, I want [Facebook / Insta / whatever].

It’s scary. If FB was an ISP that offered Facebook-only for $5 a month, I bet a lot of people would ditch their existing internet/data service.

zentiggr• 8 years ago

Buy N Large wins. For most everyone. I've learned that most people want the Fisher Price internet, not the Testors 500 piece glue it model, no matter how much cooler the model is once its built.

beamatronic2• 8 years ago

I sometimes think the Wall-E dysfunctional future Earth could be the same as the Snow Crash one. I kept looking for a U-Stor-It.

bartread3• 8 years ago

To be honest this is sort of why I have a iPhone: it does what I want and it makes life easier for me. I'm glad the alternatives exist, because that's better for all of us, and I know plenty of people prefer them, but it doesn't mean I need to be interested in them as a customer.

PhasmaFelis2• 8 years ago

It helps if you realize that there's nothing wrong with that. The smug superiority of techies starts to feel like a guy who spends every weekend tuning his car for track racing and just can't understand why anyone would ever want a factory-standard sedan (even though they only need to it to carry groceries).

ben5092• 8 years ago

It’s scary.

Those freaks probably spend time outdoors!

murftown• 8 years ago

That's hilarious. :) I agree that non-techies have plenty of ways that they're actually more balanced on average, and there are plenty of ways that a lot of techies probably seem scary to other people as well.

However, I think GP's point that the open Internet is that vulnerable to people's short-sighted social media desires IS scary. Equally scary that some people spend no time outside.

So I had to point that out despite enjoying your ironic jab.

smhenderson• 8 years ago

I have an older friend I help from time to time. When he or one of his family get a new computer, when something breaks, etc.

His wife is still on AOL to this day. Their ISP is Comcast, they all use the newest windows and she has a few applications installed other than AOL. But 95% of her time on the computer is on AOL. She just can't see doing it any other way after using it for over 20 years.

I learned way more than I ever wanted to about AOL under the hood helping her through a few hardware upgrades.

ravenstine• 8 years ago

I'm surprised it even works at all at this point. My mom was using Photoshop 6.0 (18 years old!!!) until very recently when my parents upgraded their computer to Windows 10, with which it is not compatible.

navait• 8 years ago

He says that one of the company's irksome traits is deluging its members with advertising. "You know how when you log off, you get this message, 'Please wait while we update your software?'" says Cassel. "Well, they don't tell you, but what they're really doing is downloading ads to your hard drive, so that the very next time you sign on, you get hit with -- boom! -- an ad. You get ads in your mailbox and in your chat room and an ad in the status bar."

When I read this article, there were these ads:

* A giant top ad for Intel

* Left Column: Hertz banner, fixed with scroll

* Right Column: Various ads that scroll as you scroll down the page

* Far right column: Animated McCafe ad, fix with scroll

* Multiple ads between sections including video

* Ads at the end of the article, including SalonTV

* Center Sidebar: Reese's ad

* Right sidebar: Ad for pharma product, video;

Firefox, no adblock brand new MacBook Pro was unable to smoothly scroll this page.

The more things change, the more they stay the same indeed...

elliotec• 8 years ago

I turned off my adblocker just because of this comment, and you weren't kidding. This is the most ads I've seen on one page in a long time.

atesti• 8 years ago

Maybe you haven't turned off your adblocker in a long time

bartread3• 8 years ago

This is all of course true. uBlock Origin tells me it blocked 29 requests (representing 41% of the requests made by the page). I turned off uBlock just for a laugh and the page still hasn't finished loading even though I've had time to write this whole paragraph.

One can only assume that when this article originally appeared on Salon back in February 2000 there were less ads on the site... or maybe the editorial team just had an acutely developed sense of - or an inhuman tolerance for - irony.

derefr• 8 years ago

the page still hasn't finished loading

Now, why do you expect a page with video ads to ever finish loading? Once it's played the video ads it loaded with, it just moves onto the next ones. By opening the page, you're actually tuning into an all-ads-all-the-time streaming television network!

therein• 8 years ago

* A giant top ad for Intel

I turned off uBlock Origin just to have a good laugh, like the other sibling comments and not only did I get a giant top ad from Intel that starts expanded and then oh-so-graciously offers you to minimize it with a broken animation, I got 2 of those right on top of each other, both expanded.

Their UX designers and QA engineers must have Adblock enabled.

QasimK• 8 years ago

Wow, just incredible. I too turned off my adblocker just to see this. Is this really how the vast majority of people browse the internet without an adblocker?! How do they take it? It's like letting someone slap your face, repeatedly. (Well okay, not quite as bad as that.)

asdfman123• 8 years ago

Apparently you can still get @aol.com email addresses. I want to use one the next time I'm applying for tech jobs just to freak everyone out.

exelius• 8 years ago

Watch it become the new hot property as a nostalgia item. I mean jnco is trying to make a comeback; anything is possible.

acomjean• 8 years ago

I used to use it when I was out of college in the 90s.

There were some good reasons. I travelled for work to construction sites, and they had local dial in numbers in many places. I could check email from the construction trailer. They even had a 1-800 modem line (You were very time limited, 3 hours a month or something.)

I thought it worked pretty well.

Ubiquitous Broadband killed it.

twothamendment• 8 years ago

I used it in the early and mid 90's. I never liked it, but every time I tried to cancel they'd give me another month or three for free. It was hard to argue with that.

Now I have to have an ISP who lets me open any port I want, host what I want (within reason for a home connection) and just stays out of the way.

analog31• 8 years ago

That was my experience too. My spouse and I were living in different towns, and I wanted access to my e-mail when I visited her. In return I put up with their quirky version of the Internet. My modems were too slow for any kind of Web stuff anyway.

Not much later, they changed their technology so that they worked through a conventional IP address, so you could fire up AOL, go online, then open a conventional browser or e-mail program. One of the e-mail programs had a facility for fetching your AOL e-mail, so it was like you were a regular Internet user.

Alternatives for reaching the Internet involved a lot of delving into settings files and setup scripts, which just didn't seem like a good use of my time. My friends who did things the "correct" way seemed to have a lot more trouble and maintenance effort. I listened to their adventures the same way I read Jerry Pournelle's "chaos manor" columns, feeling a mixture of amusement and pity.

ibdf• 8 years ago

The amount of ads on this article/post oughta be criminal

sureaboutthis• 8 years ago

Years ago (it would have to be, yes?), my two sons and I went to Blockbuster to rent a video. The guy behind the counter asked us if we wanted to join some Blockbuster thing which would give us some videos for free but it cost to join. I knew we weren't interested so I just replied, "AOL sucks!"

A manager heard that and took me aside to let me know that all we had to do was sign up for the thing, then go online and cancel the account, it would wind up getting us the videos for free but at no cost and his store would still get credit for signing us up. Win, win!

A few weeks later, we were at a theater thinking we got rush hour prices. When told I was wrong, and we'd have to pay full price, I said, "AOL sucks!" getting a laugh out of my boys. The lady behind the counter asked me what that was about and then said, "Oh, here. Just take these. I don't care." Free tickets!

So now you know the running joke. For several years, when we'd walk up to a counter somewhere to pay, the first words out of our mouth, "AOL sucks!!"

beamatronic2• 8 years ago

I would watch a full length movie about this. Pitch it to Hollywood!

nvr219• 8 years ago

same

digitalnomad91• 8 years ago

Who can say no to all those free CDs though?!

djsumdog2• 8 years ago

People in my dorm used them for art. One guy made a sculpture. Others microwaved them for a few seconds to get that spider pattern. Even with all the art, we still had buckets of them. What a waste.

PhasmaFelis2• 8 years ago

I recall a guy who re-tiled his kitchen with them.

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

free CDs

My parents probably still have some of the floppy disks they used to mail out floating around in their basement.

schoen• 8 years ago

I was so annoyed by those that I started trying to return them to the sender. What I didn't know is that "standard mail" (the bulk rate) doesn't include return postage in case the recipient doesn't want the item or there's a mistake with the item. So the post office most likely just discarded them and never sent them back to AOL.

Nowadays when I get junk mail I put a first-class stamp on it before attempting to bounce it back to the sender. Theoretically this should work, although there's no guarantee the postal workers will cooperate.

nobleach• 8 years ago

I used 'em as coasters for a project in college.

js22• 8 years ago

Earlier this year I was pacing a marathon when I caught up to a young woman and ran with her for a few miles. She had recently graduated from college, so early 20s I suppose. We got to chatting and at some point I mentioned AOL. She had never heard of it. I suddenly felt very old. (I'm 47.)

djsumdog2• 8 years ago

Anyone remember Compuserve, Genie (GE's online network) and that old dos version Prodigy that did all the 256 color vector graphic rendering?

js22• 8 years ago

I'm old enough to remember and have used not only those, but also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)

j45• 8 years ago

Reading this... Odd that Facebook is in some ways kinda like the community AOL was with respect to walled garden services.

TheOtherHobbes• 8 years ago

IMO FB is AOL's direct descendant. There's always a niche for packaged social internet, and it seems that niche is always going to be dominated by a single company.

FB will be superseded when a competitor for that niche appears, updated with significantly upgraded tech.

Friends don't let friends use AOL (2000)

Related Stories