Facebook Is the AOL of 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Is the AOL of 2021

zdnet.com

319 pointsafrcnc157 comments

> People even discovered more of the Internet, such as things like "file transfer protocol," where they could get lots of stuff no one had ever seen in the form of files. Programs such as "finger" let a person see who had been online, which, again, blew people's minds. People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy.

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.

TIL FTP took down AOL. Did a human actually write that? Wow. AOL died because it was a walled garden filled with manure and very few actual plants.

> a walled garden filled with manure and very few actual plants.

Sounds like Facebook in 2021.

Honestly it was Disneyland compared to FB. Because it was a paid service they tried to keep it clean and nice.

It never would have hosted the kind of anti-vax-blow-up-the-government stuff and promoted it as prime content like FB.

What you really mean is that it was US centric and wasn't spammed to death by bot networks and state-backed actors that want to sow division.

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.

That wouldn't stop state backed actors today but I agree with the first paragraph

The Internet Boogeyman from Russia and China is a fairy tale to scare kids you know. Wildly exaggerated threat.

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.

You're wrong. I've checked out many facebook propaganda sources and they are all laughingly obvious that they are state actors OR US internal sources that Facebook could quickly remove with minimal fuss. Yes the English was terrible and the propaganda horribly obvious (yet dumbasses on FB still buy into it or feed the troll). Anyway, FB doesn't want to remove them unless they pop up in mainstream media, otherwise they are very safe because they drive up viewership and commenting and the Zuck loves that.

Sure, I don't mean it doesn't exist, but that it is just not that impactfull compared to domestic lunatics. I agree FB is very bad at removing syntetic 'content farm' content.

>Honestly it was Disneyland compared to FB.

Except for the "Eternal September" part of the park.

There will always be an Eternal September in any mass communications system that is open to the public.

Disneyland has been operating for 70 something years and there are still thousands if not millions of first timers arriving every year.

Yes but Disneyland has refined its crowd control and experience to fine point. You don't see the chaos and mess because Disney spends a lot of money (and has lots of people working the parks) to contain and direct it. Even something as simple and common as a guest getting sick on a ride, Disney has a response team to handle it and keep the "Happiest Place on Earth" image alive.

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.

The September That Never Ended was Bad.

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.

> All those Teslas that average-level programmers are driving around, these days, are because of all those "tourists," and their loud shirts.

I am average programmer, but not SV. I still haven't been paid well enough to buy a Tesla.

Have you considered stealing some FAANG jobs?

Those are difficult to get. That is even besides the point that working for FAANG is advancing immoral uses of technology.

Same (not SV, average programmer), but I am paid well enough now. But it took 15-20 years to catch up to my SV friends. And only because I now work for a SV HQ'd company.

No, it always had tons of ill-informed opinions and obnoxious users. The difference is that people were able to put it in perspective.

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.

yeah deplatformming makes me think of Walter Cronkite. One side wants it their way, and that will be the way it is.

There was plenty of that nonsense back in the day, too. And plenty of novice users who just cared about owning the "libs", or making fun of Bush. We were just a lot better about putting this stuff in the right perspective.

The censorship didn't get going anywhere for the most part until about 2016. Before that, the internet was not considered a serious enough information channel compared to mainstream media to impose much censorship on. After the Trump election, the mainstream woke up, freaked out, and the screws got tightened everywhere.

The theory is that Dugin's strategies (outlined in "Foundations of Geopolitics") were widely implemented in the US in 2015-2016 in an attempt to destabilize the west.

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.

It's insane that there are still people that think our own countrymen aren't crazy enough to do this to themselves and blame a foreign power (that conveniently is an official enemy).

The implicit strategy of such active measures (according to the sources), is to take advantage of homegrown, nativist movements and co-opt them from the inside. In other words, it's best if one's own countrymen, as you put it, start and maintain the movement. At some point, the foreign power either influences it from the sidelines or outright funds and takes over the group.

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.

> The implicit strategy of such active measures (according to the sources), is to take advantage of homegrown, nativist movements and co-opt them from the inside.

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.

It's also the case, that the best historical, academic sources consistently point out that Russian disinformation and propaganda is some of the best in the world. From what I understand, based on what I've read, the US has actually learned from them. I think part of this has to do with their two decade head start over the US in political warfare. In other words, Russia has more experience doing this kind of thing over time.

You really think Russian agitprop is the best in the world? The US has conducted so many regime change operations I can't even count them, and they mostly start with propaganda aired from outside the country, funding from CIA front groups, and eventually the funding of death squads or invasions. Russia has taken Crimea, a piece of Ukraine that secures its access to a seaport, but nothing that compares to anything the US has done in recent memory (illegal invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, supporting coups in Boliva, etc) or currently (encouraging separatist movements in China).

This theory is like a mirror image of what the empire is doing to the world.

I would disagree. The Russian interference in the 2016 United States election has been described as the most effective hack of all time.

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.

Can you suggest some good reading material on the subject?

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (2020), by Thomas Rid.

Well if you take that kind of stuff seriously, you really should watch the Yuri Bezmenov interviews. Yuri was a KGB defector in the 80s who was working in India and decided to defect after he fell in love with the culture of India and became disillusioned. He worked in ideological subversion of nations through propaganda: https://youtu.be/yErKTVdETpw

Yeah, back shortly after Trump's election Google had a staff meeting. The content of it was something like we weren't successful this time, but we'll win next time. OK I found it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE

> It never would have hosted the kind of anti-vax-blow-up-the-government stuff and promoted it as prime content like FB.

The most popular content on the service was astrology horoscopes.

Which, while stupid, didn't have the effect of blowing up the government or infecting other people. Ask any newspaper of the era what their most popular section is and you'll find the same thing. "Horoscopes"

Every platform nowadays suffers from this. Reddit's admins recently posted saying they intended to continue allowing anti-vaxx content. To quote the admins themselves [1]: "we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate and dissent." YouTube is the other cornerstone of the anti-vaxx movement, hosting and (quite sinisterly) automatically recommending countless videos on the topic (see Plandemic).

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...

Well, yes. That's because it drives engagement, sells ads, and makes money. As long as they social media companies can keep the "both sides" field open they can occupy that space for profit as long as they want, without regard to morality or ethics.

As much as I despise FB, the Pages, and Groups, are great.

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 would love to read into the psychology of these people. You know, the busybody, snitchy neighbour type. The type that scrutinizes a neighbours home improvements for the most trivial of infractions (we don't allow this colour of flower in this HOA!), or who threatens to report people for banal things that aren't even illegal (gasp... someone legally parked on the publicly owned street).

There's something called other-directed perfectionism that could be at work. Someone who can't stand to see imperfections around them or tolerate the fact the humans are just imperfect.

Or 2020, or 2019. Wait, that sounds like Facebook since it's creation.

It's the type of myopic perspective that I would expect from a comment here instead.

I had the exact same reaction to reading those lines. Everyone I knew was more than happy to use AOL to surf the World Wide Web it was only when their cost and speed stagnated next to competitors did people jump ship.

AOL thought they were an ISP, when really they were a media and community company. I was a kid in the 90s, and my friends' parents didn't want them on the broader internet. AOL was considered safe. While they should have leaned into that, they also had an uphill battle - people now paid their cable companies for internet access, and didn't want to pay AOL's (high) prices for access to content.

> Everyone I knew was more than happy to use AOL to surf the World Wide Web

Which was a service AOL didn't really provide at first. Only when it became a kind of ISP.

Your memory of AOL isn't old enough, then. I remember AOL before they had a web browser, which they later reluctantly added in a bid to keep relevance. You remember the latter days of AOL, when the writing was on the wall.

I setup my own geocities website in 1998, so they had to have had it then. According to the document here [1], AOL's web browser was introduced in 1995.

[1] https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/2/

1998 is the later days of AOL. Its heyday was 1991-1995, when basically everybody got multiple AOL disks in the mail, you'd have TV advertisements telling you to visit a certain AOL keyword, and they were basically the only user-friendly way of getting online. (The competition like Prodigy or Compuserve had very clunky user interfaces, and GEnie and BBSes were text-only.)

The writing was on the wall for AOL as soon as Netscape and Yahoo came out in 1994.

Feels strange to say 1991 was the heyday. I don't know of a single person with a home PC in 1991, much less internet.

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.

To bolster your point, the movie “You’ve Got Mail” released in December 1998.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." -- William Gibson.

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.

AOL as a brand started in 1989. What do you think it was doing for six years, just running a Coming Soon page?

Companies can be around for a while before they refine their product and really take off. I disagree with the idea that AOL's heyday was the early 90's. From my own experiences growing up - and even from just looking at their subscriber growth - their heyday (to me) is the late 90's. If you have a different perspective that's fine though.

This matches my experience as well. On an unrelated note, thanks for API Spy Pat! I used it extensively back in the day. Hope you're doing well!

lol, you're welcome on the api spy! Always cool when someone remembers that :).

I find many of the articles on ZDNet, and CNET, are either inaccurate, fluff, or clickbait.

Especially CNET these days, wow!! They used to write good articles like 10 years ago. Not anymore!!

Exactly, AOL failed to move on broadband because the subscription model they had with dial up internet was very profitable. Additionally, the cable companies realizing the opportunity were not about to let AOL to continue to collect rent over their wires... Facebook is very different from AOL.

AOL is the reason I got broadband. I tried to cancel and they gave me 6 free months of high-speed to stay with them, with a recurring rate that was $10 more than the provider who delivered the high-speed to my house.

After the 6 months was up, I cancelled AOL and stayed with the provider.

Though what allowed cable/DSL companies to move into the ISP business was the complete decoupling of content from access. In 1991, when there was no practical WWW and you navigated a bunch of proprietary content by typing in AOL keywords, a cable company would've had to implement a full graphical browser and a large library of content to be useful. By 1998, when we had Netscape and IE and Yahoo and millions of websites, those industries were all disaggregated and we just needed the pipes.

There's a lesson in unbundling here, but it probably doesn't apply to Facebookin quite the manner the author intends.

I suspect the problem is that they had no infrastructure to sell. They should have been doing co-branded offerings fulfilled by local telecoms. Once people are calling to say "I called the local telecom and ordered DSL/Cable direct, close my account", they're trying to negotiate customer retention from the back foot.

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.

Why didn't you just keep AOL for the chat thing, and use broadband for everything else? I'm sure it wouldn't have been that much.

I feel AOL failed because of managment period.

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.

At the management level their where many issues to blame the original folks for it though is blind… Steve’s brother dies of brain cancer. The market crashed causing all the time Warner execs to go ape shit on losing their cash bonuses in favor of worthless stocks that had been the primary motivator… combined with the market changes in broadband… and yeah 12 years of growth turned negative in what felt like overnight - hindsight a million things could have been handled better. Best anyone can do is learn and do better which IMO is exactly what Facebook, google and Amazon have been doing …

Don't forget they bought Time Warner including their cable TV/Internet operation. Say what you will about the service itself, but as a business, they did pretty well.

And the price. AOL charged by the minute and were slow to switch to unlimited...much like Blockbuster was reluctant to kill late fees and ended up losing to Netflix's DVD distribution (even before they got into streaming).

I guess that was motivator to look for alternatives.

I found it funny when people started switching to broadband and AOL still somehow convinced them they'll need to pay them.

I grew up on AOL's internet and it really wasn't that bad. The WWW was a lot different back then. Remember, this was even before Google! The article acts like AOL was some wasteland that the company never bothered to update.

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.

> I grew up on AOL's internet and it really wasn't that bad.

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.

Funny story - they switched to an Unlimited hours policy (slowly creeping up from several hours over time.)

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.

>On top of that, there were programs like A-O-Hell which let people circumvent payment

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"

I don’t know if I necessarily want to spill out all the details, but very early on for me AOL access came about when I discovered a way to “spoof” payments (not using A-O-Hell) via a checking account and routing number that AOL didn’t bother validating.

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.

> The reason my family switched away from AOL was because we could get faster internet through our cable company.

This is exactly the reason AOL went away. People initially switched to ISPs, then to local telecoms, then to cable providers.

Yea, but their site was never very good? Even at the time, I felt they didn't quite know what do with their group site.

Every few months/years, I would check back, and still found the site the same.

Eventually the replication of free versions of AOL's services on the broader Internet devalued its offering to the point that once standalone Internet connections were cheaper and more broadly available (especially things like NetZero) people simply dumped their AOL subscriptions or never subscribed in the first place.

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.

And then came the Eternal September.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

A lot of people I know have online lives that live within or around facebook and nothing else.

They get their news from facebook as the news/media organisation posts updates to their feeds, which they can share with others via WhatsApp or messenger. No need to visit the news sites it's all there.

They get their local second hand marketplace through Facebook Marketplace, no need for eBay et al.

They get their local community updates, gossip, business recommendations etc. through Facebook Groups. No need for nextdoor or neighbourhoood specific websites/forums.

They can find local businesses through the Facebook as the businesses have a Page that describes what they do, testimonials from previous customers, bit of a social feed to add some personality/'blogging'. Contactable through messenger. The businesses don't need to setup a website, Facebook offers all the tools.

You never have to leave, especially on iOS/Android if you use the facebook app. Even links to external sites are rendered in a webview, so no need to look at URLs.

I've been dragged into Instagram.

For months now I've been searching for some good used furniture. Mostly MCM stuff. I'd prefer private party sales, but am open to dealers as well.

For the personal side I was checking Nextdoor, Craigslist, and OfferUp. Hours of scrolling and modifying search queries and I couldn't find anything worth checking out. Those sites are for $50 couches and $20 bookshelves.

For the dealer side, I was just searching the web. My impression was that furniture dealers were either a dying business, or all search engines suck. The only results I kept getting were Pinterest, 1stdibs, or Chairish. These are sites with insane markups where (I suspect) you're supposed to be smart enough to haggle down. I gather they also take a large cut, so not many dealers list with them at all.

I finally got a clue and re-animated my ancient IG account. Whaddayaknow? That's where everyone is! Suddenly I've found and followed a couple dozen resale shops that offer all sorts of cool stuff. All within an hour of where I live. Half the time, the URL they have in their bio is a dead website. Or, it exists but hasn't been updated in months. They've given up on having their own website and sell only inside the walled garden now.

It's a shame.

I still haven't logged into Facebook proper. I probably should find out if Marketplace is better than Craigslist, et. al. for classified ads.

Marketplace is far more active in my area. It's not better, IMHO (the search is all but unusable) but there's more stuff to be had and items showing up in one place (often FB Marketplace) aren't always on the other (CL, offerup, etc.)

Out of curiosity, where exactly on IG do you find MCM furniture? Is there a specific hashtag or?

For me, it was one local shop that had an abandoned website. (I actually drove to their old location, trusting the address on the site).

When I talked to the owner, she said something like, "Oh. Yeah, I post everything on Instagram now."

So I followed that business on my IG and looked at other shops she follows. They're mostly local, so I did as well. After a few of those, Instagram took over and started recommending me more and more places. About 10% of the recommendations are more local shops, so I keep adding them.

I don't search by hashtags (yet?), but looking through some of the posts in my feed, these seem to be the common ones: [#furniturerestoration #midcenturymodern #midcenturyfurniture #midcenturydesign]

This whole experience has made me feel what my parents must have in 1996, when I was teaching them about e-mail and the difference between "slash" and "backslash" :)

Facebook might not be the place to find high-end furniture, but it is everything that Craigslist was, and before that newspaper classifieds were, especially in rural areas.

I've recently purchased these items via Facebook groups and marketplace, all of which were listed no place else:

- the exact boat I had wanted for years

- a ton of home brewing gear

- lightly used children's shoes, at $75 off list price

- a chest freezer

- a 4k monitor

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is outrageously effective.

I agree about high end items.

We started some home renovations recently and used FB Marketplace to get rid of everything. We got rid of a vanity, toilet, light fixtures, oven, skill saw, media center, and more. We usually list it for ~$20 (except the oven) and if the person doesn't do anything weird we give it for free. It's way better than throwing things out.

Maybe try aptdeco.com?

(Haven't used it myself so can't testify)

I just checked it out and they seem to have good stuff listed. Prices are also decent. Unfortunately they're not in Southern California yet.

Bookmarked anyway. Hopefully they add more regions soon.. Thanks!

At this point I look at Instagram because it has way more "here is a shiny thing you want to buy" and way less "doom-scroll for more things wrong with the world" than any other platform I have used in the last 18 months.

FB provides local groups as well that I have yet to find popular alternative for. There is a whole portion of the population that doesn't mind sharing their whole life with FB for the convenience offered by some key services.

Mind that the same people might not share all their "moments" directly on FB, and therefore you might not necessarily see them on your feed.

I have thought about this before. As someone who would never use Facebook, I want to judge the Facebook—centric view of the web, but then I think about how I live my entire online existence around an RSS reader (Feedly in my case). There’s obviously a level of manipulation in Facebook that isn’t present in an RSS reader, but I understand the mindset of setting a central portal in the online world.

Having different sites'feeds you look at in an RSS reader is different though. In my case I have over 500 of them. I continue to add and remove whenever a feed breaks or sites stop updating.

This is exactly what I've seen too.

Sure, young people may not use FB too much these days, but there are a ton of adults that are close to 100% invested in FB usage. It's simply a one stop shop for almost all their needs.

And I'm gonna be honest, a LOT of my previous forum and classifieds usage has been taken to facebook, which I'm using every single day.

Young people (say under <20, those that actually don't use FB[1]) have no need for FB in the first place - they see their friends every day in school, in parascholar activities and social gatherings. Once you are out of school is when the model gets sticky, FB becomes the bridge between you and your social life for most people - it really is between FB (+Insta/WA), phones and e-mails, and guess which holds the most contacts for most people [speculation/projection]. Snapchat and TikTok and great competitors for their share of online time-spent, but they won't be able to replace FB's utility for keeping in touch with people you've met once they need such a SM.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribu...

> Young people (say under <20, those that actually don't use FB[1]) have no need for FB in the first place - they see their friends every day in school, in parascholar activities and social gatherings.

Yeah..2020 and the better part of 2021 might have something to say about that

>FB becomes the bridge between you and your social life for most people - it really is between FB (+Insta/WA), phones and e-mails

And guess what Facebook did in 2012? Stripped out email addresses from profiles

That's exactly what Facebook wants. Becoming your OS.

It seems like I completely mis-remember things...

IIRC, in addition to being an "online portal" to online content, it was also an ISP. Back in those days, most internet access was via a Dial-Up modem. If you wanted to get online, your computer had to make a phone call. Where we were, dialing outside of the region defined by our prefix (the 3 numbers after the area code) was considered a "long distance call" and was like 10 cents per minute or something. Connecting to the internet ran up your phone bill ~ fast! if you did not have a LOCAL ISP. IIRC (which is questionable), AOL had toll free numbers, but they'd charge you for your time online - so your internet bill came from your ISP only and not from ISP + Phone Company. Part of AOL's marketing gimmick "first 1,000 hours free!" or some such amount of time to get you to sign up.

This was nearly 30 years ago, and I didn't really understand how it all worked back then, and my parents paid the phone bills (not me!) so my recollection may be full of partial-truths or downright falsehoods. But point being - I think the article really understates AOL's role in being an ISP (especially for rural folks who didn't have local ISPs).

That matches my experience. We were limited by the number of hours for our local ISP, too. Think they even had different plans for how many hours per month we wanted.

Large dial-up ISPs had huge lists of numbers you could use to dial in with so that you could pick the one which was local to you. I'm not sure how this worked on the provider side, but customers pretty much never payed by-the-minute fees to dial into their ISP.

About this:

"The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL. Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision."

Okay, but the tone is critical, so let's ask the question, if this limited vision is somehow a bad thing, why have we seen it for 30 years? If it was there at the beginning of the Web, and it is here now that the Web is mature, then there must be something compelling about "this limited vision."

Keep in mind, I was a huge fan of the original blogosphere of 2000-2008, and I was sad when it was killed off with the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. My first startup, from 2002-2008, was originally focused on weblog tools, before we moved onto ecommerce tools.

But, again, the question needs to be faced, why did people find Facebook more interesting that the blogosphere, and why did decentralized attempts at social networks (such as FOAF, Friend Of A Friend) fail to take off, despite a lot of hype from all the major dev personalities?

Merely whining about the way the world is doesn't really help anyone. Instead of complaining about "this limited vision" it would be helpful to see more essays about why, exactly, people continue to choose limited walled-gardens. Why don't more people want to see some wider vision fulfilled? Why don't more people explore more widely? Why don't more people take out there wallet and spend more money for the kind of independent content that, in theory, they might want to see?

I suspect because almost no one wants to be a “gardener” of microblog/message/talk/email, and most do not know how. They just want to follow and talk to people. FB solves all of these with one signup, as did myspace. I also expect gaining traction for decentralized networks is by definition harder as the brand has fragmented.

Honestly there are a lot more things now that lead me to believe that blogging is on an upswing. There are quite a few newer blog directories I've found recently.

I left Facebook years ago and have no reason to go back. I can share photos and videos with friends and family easily enough. Most of the online relationships were pretty superficial as well, so I don't need them anyway.

Facebook does have some value, but it seems like the signal to noise ratio is very low. I'm not sure how rare my case is though. How many people in there 20-40s feel the same?

Here in Ecuador most of my immediate friends and family have moved to sharing photos and videos in private whatsapp groups.

So they've moved away from Facebook the product, but not Facebook the company.

I mostly use it for family that is on there. The "feed" is horrible, filled with ads and timely things always appear out of order. Stuff from neighborhood sometimes shows something from 3 days after something occurred higher than something today.

Yeah I don't know how people get their news this way... It drives me insane that it'll consistently show me weather from 4 days ago but not today. NOT USEFUL.

I feel the same. Most my friends just use Instagram (for memes mostly). I like using just Snapchat for sharing photos with my close friends, which is better than sharing with literally everyone.

Of course, you still have people who's primary motive is to farm for likes. I don't see their attitudes changing anytime soon..

25 here. Got rid of FB about 5 years ago. Never looked back. Never been happier. It’s actually cancer for your mental health.

I noticed all my nephews did the same.

The main feed is pretty much straight up junk. Real value (IMO) lies in the hobby groups, local history groups, community groups/pages, etc.

I stopped following any groups or pages, and I'm only friends with people who I'm on a first name basis with. This is probably Facebook as originally intended. The signal to noise ratio is only middling and my usage has gone way down

I just got rid of mine. Only ever used it during holidays, birthdays, and things like that.

Do not delete your Facebook. Delete your friends, delete your posts using scripts widely available.

This is what I did. You will not have any way to "re-activate" it, this way. You will keep your access to fb signin, events and messenger.

Can you link to such scripts?

Not sure why this is being downvoted. Deleting posts via scripts gave my Facebook a second life. I just use it for messenger and events. Highly recommended.

Exactly, and I put a cover picture explaining the situation (it is a closed account blabla), so I didn't receive any judgement from friends. Having removed friends, also means I can not go back in a smooth manner. It is a good way to cut yourself off of facebook's network effect without losing access to events, fb signin, messenger.

If I absolutely wanted to, I could createa second account for that with none of my friends read: um... family, that my first account had on it.

If I wanted to ever use Facebook again, which I don't. I'd create a new account.

All this talk about Facebook without mentioning their huge investment in FB Reality Labs (FBRL) and the statements from Mark that he will turn them into a "Metaverse" company in 5 years. Now, will they be "the AOL of" this Metaverse is still to be determined but FB are pulling XR out from the tech fringes into a mainstream audience. Apple may well be making similar moves if rumors are to be taken seriously. As far as the Metaverse is concerned, we are still in the late DARPA-NET or early BBS days so while this title may hold true, it would be for reasons that are unintended by the author or those commenting here so far.

I’ll believe Mark when it happens. In 2017 he also said he’d ship a billion oculuses; I think they sell maybe 3M a year.

My 2c; I did see their remote work demo and thought it was kind of cool, although (anecdotally) coding in a virtual screen tends to give me headaches. But until the headsets arent heavy, expensive, and silly-looking or require goofy paddles I do not think the VR metaverse will be gaining any mass traction.

Personally I have found current VR is fun for some games and tedious for everything else. The wow factor of a large expensive facial protrusion with a screen and gyro was gone by the time Oculus was acquired. What followed was a lowering of price, allowing for 4-5x more users per year to be disappointed. And Facebook has more or less failed at all their hw offerings thus far despite much PR, right? I dont see that changing. They should stick to monetizing your information IMO, they’ve been able to make that highly efficient and it doesn’t cost $800 for the end user or leave large imprints on their faces.

I stopped reading at "a software program called TCP/IP"

Geez, that article takes its time to get to the point doesn't it, WTF is the detour to Snap! and Friendster for?

Skimming the second half it seems the author got lost, he started talking about all the ways Facebook with its terrible anti-consumer actions isn't AOL...

> But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written.

I think it will be harder to unseat Facebook than it was for AOL simply because of size.

At its peak, AOL had around 34 million subscribers. Thus you could easily grow and build by service by appealing to people who had never been on AOL and who we’re not enmeshed in the AOL ecosystem.

Facebook has billions of users. There aren’t enough people in the world who have Internet access to allow someone to build a massive service out of people who have never been on Facebook. Add to that Instagram and WhatsApp and there are not that many people who are on the Internet but not a part of Facebook’s ecosystem.

Facebook doesn't get unseated, it splinters, losing potency gradually (assuming regulators keep them from buying the competition).

Facebook will still be the dominate global social network 10-20 years from now. What will change is that there will be more niche social networks with approaches/audiences/subjects-of-focus that Facebook couldn't cater to well enough (which is why Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Imgur exist).

Well I'm not anymore. I've never used Whats app and have absolutely no need for Instagram. I was on Facebook itself until I couldn't stand it.

My personal take.

AOL died when private rooms stopped being private and the personal filing cabinet (unlimited storage) was discontinued. AOL easily had the biggest warez scene, once that was over and nobody could share files they went elsewhere.

I think it started when broadband started rolling out nationally in the late 90s. My whole neighborhood for example was on dialup, everyone used AOL(for the most part), and just like that, it was gone once @home rolled fiber optics. AOL didn't seem to have any plan for that. Our family actually wanted to keep AOL, but they still wanted their 24.99 or whatever for the privilege, and well, few people found it worth it.

Yep. Basically this. Everything else is silly speculation. Download speeds went from agonizing, even for the time!, to eye watering fast.

I remember downloading 300MB in roughly 30 minutes to an hour back then. To me that was absolutely incredible. And it was! For the time.

Whatever AOL was doing back then was irrelevant. Warez moved from place to place. People knew this and responded to the changes over the years as things naturally evolved.

Yeah, it completely changed how the internet and computers in general were used. Early advertising was 'look how quick it is, youll save so much time.' But that turned into 'hey this doesn't suck, I'll spend more time online!'

The biggest change for me, personally, was going from an HPB to an LPB. That brings back old memories. Does that terminology even exist anymore?

We've lost a lot of cool acronyms and initialisms over the years, and I've seen others paired down, but I think we lost HPB and LPB for sure.

Man proggies were so fun. The other day I was remembering the way proggies had their own unique skins which made them fun to use and collect. Then it hit me, music production plugins are basically the modern equivalent. They have all sorts of custom art and unique interactivity / features.

Someone named Len(I think) had been archiving them, but I saw that site no longer exists sadly(lenshell.com).

Fear not, someone apparently made an archive of the archive!

http://lenshellprogarchive.com/hell.html

Yahoo is perhaps more apt of a comparison: They do not offer anything that is not easily replaceable, they fail to innovate at every turn, and their revenue is almost completely tied to advertising.

You might say this describes Google as well, but search provides a real utility and I honestly don’t know what Facebook provides anyone other than an addicting experience that makes the user feel actively worse.

There was a time in the late 1990s when Yahoo News seemed to be a top performer in terms of republishing or carrying wire stories. They lost an opportunity to redesign the media landscape, something nobody has still been able to do decades later. Ask a random person where they get their news today. Prepare for some strange looks and answers.

Google search was good 15 years ago, when SEO wasn't as much of a thing as it is today. Now it's pretty much errelevant.

This article is sadly lacking in historical accuracy. AOL grew out of Quantum Link which definitely predated the Internet. In its heyday it provided far more utility than the Internet of the time. This is a terrible comparison.

AOL died because the world went broadband and AOL was dial-up. That's it. That's the only reason. It was pretty good in a lot of other ways, and I'd argue there's still a place for it today.

If you think FB is destined for failure because AOL failed, you're crazy.

FB is still on the leading-edge of change in this industry (Oculus). There's zero sense of stagnation in that company.

Zero sense of stagnation because what they do is actively tricking the user at every turn (lying about Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions, same thing with the Oculus) and users have no choice

Wrong. The past is not the future. The future is the future. Facebook is Facebook, AOL was AOL.

As I remember, AOL was a dial-up internet provider. The reason it held up for so long is because large swaths of USA didn't have broadband access up until very recently.

> Facebook Is the AOL of 2021

Thanks ZDNet; that's the most succinct explanation I've ever read for why I've never had a Facebook account.

Yeah I would have to agree. I just deleted mine about a week ago. I have absolutely no regrets.

This is what people keep telling themselves and yet FB isn't showing any signs of failure or making stupid purchases.

Guess I'll add my 2 cents. AOL died to me when I could chat with friends on ICQ and I had free Internet from NetZero, free e-mail from Juno.

When everything could be "free" by having ads - why pay for AOL? I do remember too, I got free DSL service AND a free DSL modem via an ad service.

It's kinda why good journalism is dying, too. Every time a paywall article is posted here people are up in arms or post a free version. Then, we have articles from zdnet which is clickbait, people are up in arms.

from Futurama season two:

"Good news everyone! Several years ago I tried to log on to AOL, and it just went through! Wheee! We're online!" ―Farnsworth

'bout sums up my AOL days

Ahh, I was thinking MySpace...

... says zdnet

s/2021/2004/g

AOL never had the reach of Facebook, even adjusted for era, population, anything really.

HN has been predicting Facebook's demise for years, and it keeps getting bigger, making more money, etc etc.

Despite what you might think, Facebook isn't a giant Nuremburg Rally that will impale itself on race hate and political polarization...that's just the twisted worldview you're imposing on it.

The biggest turnoff about AOL to me is that I wanted the internet to be a world thing not an America thing.

Most ISPs operate in a specific area, even today.

Sure, but that's usually a logistical limitation, not that you're supporting only having that specific area online.

Also in general the word "America" turns me off unless used to refer to the entirety of North and South America, and wreaks of US-centric view of the world.

United States of America (USA) != America

America == The United States of America

The opening line on Wikipedia:

"The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America"

Even the French and German wikis say the same thing. Why? Because America is a near universally understood abbreviation of The United States of America.

Logical brevity is all that's about. No other nation on the planet has "America" in its name, which is just one more reason why there's so little confusion about which nation is being referred to and why it's obviously a trivial matter.

It has been a widely understood name for the US for two centuries. It has been in wide use since long before the US was a globally relevant or powerful nation, which entirely invalidates your notion that it somehow relates to a US-centric view of the world.

The people of the US are very commonly known as Americans, not USians or United Statesians.

North America is a continent. South America is a continent. America is the abbreviated name for a country. It's not complicated to differentiate.

> commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America

Well I disagree. "Commonly known as" doesn't mean logically correct. For that matter ticks and pill bugs are commonly known as insects but they aren't.

> Logical brevity is all that's about.

US (2 syllables) is shorter than America (4 syllables)

> No other nation on the planet has "America" in its name

Well South Africa might have Africa in its name but it isn't known as "Africa". Being the largest country by size doesn't mean anything either, as Saudi Arabia has "Arabia" in its name but isn't known as "Arabia". "Arabia" also includes Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain.

> The people of the US are very commonly known as Americans

I would argue that Canadians and Mexicans and Peruvians are also Americans, just like Egyptians and Nigerians and Ethiopians are all Africans.

> not USians or United Statesians.

Funny you say because in Spanish it is completely valid to say exactly that.

https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-58389811

"El ejército estadounidense ..."

"Los últimos vuelos estadounidenses ..."

https://www.wfla.com/tampa-hoy/mundo/algunos-estadounidenses...

"Algunos estadounidenses ..."

"reeks".

The name "America Online" was never a political statement, it was always a logistical description of their service area.

Also, English is a language where words may have multiple valid meanings, which are determined by its use, and the onus is placed on the reader to determine which meaning was intended by the speaker.

This is why I don't use Peruvian Airlines: air travel should be global but these wiseguys only want it to be Peruvian!

My mom discovered Facebook last weekend and opened an account and is trying to figure out how to use it. I considered opening a short position in FB today.

The day my mom joined Twitter, I freaked out!! Well she never was on Twitter, Twitter just said she was.

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