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Comment by patorjk | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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 :).

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.

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!!

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.

And then came the Eternal September.

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

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