> dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today.
Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah.
MSN Messenger had MSN chat which was IRC esque and MSN Groups had their own instances or chat it was glorious. Anywhere you went with chatrooms the internet attracted people like crazy! AOL was definitely full of those types.
AOL also had annoying (to me) parental control settings. Thankfully I could justify internet access outside the AOL program by stating that games didnt work online otherwise I would be restricted to AOLs trashy browser.
>Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms
My phrase of "interact that much" was relative to today's Facebook type of social penetration. Yes, I also interacted with others on old USENET, BBSs, Compuserve (CIS userid), AOL, etc. Many of us did.
But Facebook's social graph is the phenomenon that bridged the gap of grandparents seeing updates on the grandkids, high school alumni and past coworkers "finding" each other again and extending weak ties ("friend each other"). This type of social interaction is very sticky and difficult to switch away from. USENET/CIS/AOL level of interaction was much weaker.
Ah that's fine, I misunderstood what you said as if it meant that the internet didn't have people talking to one another back then. I think the internet is just scaled out more so it feels like a lot more, but I guess you got a point, most people I knew were not on the internet as much as I was. A lot of them had access, and I would talk to them when they came online.
Honestly, it seems like we never successfully replicated the AOL/Prodigy era chat room paradigm. My family still has friends we met in late-90s AOL chat rooms, and we honestly ended up stuck on their dialup for years longer than would have been sane due to wanting to stick to that community (at the time, I think the bring-your-own-connection service was still an extra fee, so we'd have to pay $15 to a local ISP plus $15 for AOL or whatever, versus paying them $25 in the first place."
There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.
I also wonder if by tying it to a paid service in the first place gave a bit more ammunition for moderators to handle the "obnoxious 12-year-old" class of troll.
> There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.
Some clients are nice enough to include a list of common / popular servers, but they don't provide much more context about them. I would love to see some of those modern IRCv3 features but I'm not sure of clients supporting them and IRC networks supporting them.
Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah.
MSN Messenger had MSN chat which was IRC esque and MSN Groups had their own instances or chat it was glorious. Anywhere you went with chatrooms the internet attracted people like crazy! AOL was definitely full of those types.
AOL also had annoying (to me) parental control settings. Thankfully I could justify internet access outside the AOL program by stating that games didnt work online otherwise I would be restricted to AOLs trashy browser.