I wouldn't put too much gloss on that. I was on AOL from its original GeoWorks-based release forward, and it always had considerably more mass appeal than icb/forumnet, IRC, Usenet, or any of the other Internet-based forums/chatrooms of the time. It was night-and-day.

You have to remember before there was AOL there was Prodigy, Quantum Link/PC-Link (which became AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, etc--all services that were mass-marketed to some extent and had healthy user bases that were mostly not very technical or academic. Modems were easy to use and ubiquitous at that point so if you had a computer at home, there was a decent chance you had one.

A lot of the early AOL folks consolidated from those services and the social BBS scenes, which were also not nearly as techie as you'd imagine.

So yeah, there were a lot less of us than when they started shipping out discs with hundreds of hours and later unlimited, but the audience wasn't necessarily more sophisticated. As soon as it was a standalone app and not GeoWorks-based, in particular, it seriously took off.