Hacker News Reader

I distinctly remember "AOL Keywords" as a signal that corporations were going to find a way to ruin the internet with their walled gardens.

And while that idea didn't pan out, the general idea seems to be roughly what happened. The internet is now mostly a grouping of separate spaces like Facebook, Apple's store, TikTok, IG, etc.

View on HN

As a former AOL user, it was truly a walled garden. For hordes of less tech-savvy users like myself, AOL was the internet. Many of us had little concept of an internet "beyond" AOL.

The current situation might be referred to as "windowed gardens". We get to look around and choose the fiefdom we hate the least.

...progress?

Part of the reason AOL was successful was the limitations of dial-up and the inclusion of high quality art assets on AOL CDs, that made it more fun and visually interesting to be on AOL vs the WWW in the mid-90s. Browsers were pretty bad (AOL's own internal browser included), HTML was quite limited, etc. Broadband is what killed AOL. The moderation was pretty loose on the forums and chat rooms, and it felt like a pretty free place to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com