I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news, zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad bar, and the lack of community.
I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20 a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an ad.
We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5 dollars here or there for disparate services.
Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course vid/pic sharing.
I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to have to download separate programs or visit different websites to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very community like.
I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.
As an avid AOL user, that is the worst version of the internet. I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet. Whatever some large corporation had paid AOL so they could build a shitty little Visual Basic type app that controlled everything you looked at. There were no ads because the entire experience besides the chat rooms and IM was an ad. It was a lot of people's first email accounts but spam blocking was so bad back then I count that as advertising.
I remember being blown away by discovering people would randomly make private chats and trying to guess at what the chat name would be for things I was interested in as a kid. Then I remember having my mind blown that AOL had a built in browser where someone had built a website, not a keyword, that actually had my niche interest that no one in real life did. Then I discovered you could download a much better version of that experience called a browser.
Your idea is just Facebook where you can't link out and is fully corporate controlled. Which I guess is actually Twitter.
I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
> I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet
Is it really that different from having the .com of a word today?
> I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
I struggle to see how you got to that conclusion, but it's an absolutely true statement nonetheless so I cannot complain.
It reminds me of that meme, maybe called the midwit meme?
On the left you have the dumb guy, saying AOL does everything. On the right you have the hooded guy, saying AOL does everything.
In the middle you have the crying guy saying no you should use Netscape browser, and ICQ for messaging, and usenet for forums, and dogpile for search, etc.
I can say my family never once paid for AOL or cared about its basket of features. But we did pay for NetZero for a long time until broadband become more affordable in our area.
I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news, zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad bar, and the lack of community.
I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20 a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an ad.
We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5 dollars here or there for disparate services.
Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course vid/pic sharing.
I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to have to download separate programs or visit different websites to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very community like.
I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.