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Short answer, yes:
http://www.aolsucks.org/parker.htm

Longer answer, AOL used lots of volunteer hosts for message boards and online games. They were usually compensated with an hour of online time for every hour volunteered (back in the days when AOL charged by the hour).

http://aolsucks.org/

Here are the programs you need to have a k-133t windows system.

1. AOL- DUH, they are the greatest ISP ever.

2. Webshots - Impress your friends with your changing wallpaper!

3. Hotbar - Skin Internet Explorer and Impress your friends!

4. AOHell This program will make you l33t!

5. Incredimail This makes your e-mail look k00lah then everyone elses.

6. Microsoft Outlook because all the anti-virus tools work with it. You don't want to use another e-mail client, you might get a virus!

7. Comet Cursor. Makes your cursor R0x0r.

8. Intruder Alert 99 You need a firewall, the internet isn't a safe place!

9. Gator Gator is an awesome program that helps u remember ur passwords. This way u don't have to fill out stupid forms!

10. BO Server The guys in my gaming clan sent me this, they said it would improve my FPS, and make windows run faster. I think it did!

Historically, AOL has viewed itself as an entertainment company. The AOL muckity mucks cared about the big business deals, the marketing drive that will change the world, etc. The media mogul in Barton Fink is an example of the style of executive that ran the show during the height of the dot.com bubble.

But AOL Email Operations was just another overworked technical dept. The email application didn't bring in any revenue directly. Also, it was an overhead application that couldn't be cleanly assigned into one of the Balkanized divisions at AOL. For years, it had little marketing and little development effort applied to it. Buying Netscape for $4 billion dollars got lots of attention, upgrading the pre-internet AOL email infrastructure didn't.

The top level AOL exec's heard about spam complaints, but they heard lots of complaints about lots of things. Nothing was catching on fire and exploding in email so they assumed it must not have been that bad.

Another reason why AOL business exec's tended to ignore the techies. Keep in mind that hardcore techies had spent years vehemently ragging on AOL. Inspite of that, AOL became a major business success (well, at least for a few years). So whenever an internet purist gave a lecture on how things were supposed to be done, it triggered a gut level hostile response with many exec's at AOL.

So the result of all of this is, for the past several years, there were only background projects for fighting spam (and handling ISP complaints). Current problems are a result of that legacy.

But I think things might be changing. Remember AOL tried to takeover Time Warner? Well Time Warner has essentially staged a reverse coup and kicked out all the "deal junkies" at AOL. I think the Time Warner folks are pushing a much more back to basics approach for business deals, financial accounting, and for the AOL online service.

The upcoming AOL 9.0 release is supposed to be a lot better at spam fighting (although I haven't tried it much yet).

I hope that the new exec's really are making spam fighting a strategic priority (which I think they might be). If so, you should see real results in a year or two. Including, hopefully, a lot less false positives for spam (where positive really means negative delivery of mail, whatever) and much higher levels of support for email delivery complaints.

I agree with other posters that the article seems high in fluff and low in content (understandable, since anything else would be a technical paper, not an article). But the things that stood out for me when I read the article were the part mentioned in the parent ("go to the core of the Internet and make radical changes"), and this:

"This is about pooling resources and to build out the infrastructure, but in the end this about lowering the barrier to entry to developing on the Internet," Peterson said.

"Lowering the barrier?" My goodness, my 12-year-old daughter could be designing Flash-enabled websites if she weren't so busy on AIM. What "barrier" are they talking about? I'd almost suggest we need higher "barriers" to keep out the "wELCOM tO MY wEBSIGHTE" kiddies.

Now read that last sentence again.

Maybe I'm letting paranoia run loose, but there are more than a few folks in industry that would also like to keep those kiddies off the 'net, raise the bar, have an Internet that is "more useful everyday," as Bill would say. The net effect, though, is to remove the internet gadflies that make the 'net such a democratizing medium.

The web's success isn't due to the Microsofts and the AOLs -- it's the little guys like me and you who rub the fat cats the wrong way.

With "high-tech companies... key to the project's success" (and Intel and HP specifically mentioned), I'm afraid their goal is to make the 'net better for those high-tech companies... and to leave the rest of the masses out of the "New Internet".

But maybe I'm just being paranoid.

NTL are the only ISP I know of that had their own hate site in the form of NTHell [nthellworld.com]. Which they then bought out, employed it's creator and turned it into a customer services forum thing.

aolsucks.org has been up for years, although now it routes to aolwatch.com, but still is devoted to why aol sucks.

Enjoyed the article-- but that's probably because it was obliquely about sex.

---
Destiny-land.
The happiest blog on earth.

I believe you there is a HOW-TO on how to cancel your AOL account at http://www.aolsu cks.org

Once upon a time, I made a fansite about a different TV show. The only copyrighted material I used was one picture of the main character (fair use 3) for non-commercial (fair use 1) purposes. I even linked to the official site (fair use 4).

The copyright owners sent me a cease and desist letter. I took the image down within half an hour of checking my mail. I would later study the issue in more depth and discover that fair use is not infringement; cease and desist letters against obvious fair use can constitute harassment.

So I asked for a license. They refused to give me one, claiming a possibility of defamation aka libel. Then I just took the site down and put a rant in its place.

AOLsucks.org recently got in legal trouble with America Online Inc. The webmaster's lawyer told him that "under legal precedent, when a large corporation uses lawsuits (or the threat of them) to try to silence critics, that there are grounds for a harassment suit against that corporation."

I see nothing wrong with a law that explicitly states how long service providers can give users to remove illegal material (especially since it would take 5 minutes in front of a computer to do this) as long as the time frame is suitable.

I once got a cease and desist for a TV show fanpage I was doing (corporate "remove this infringing material within 5 days" bullying like what happened to aolsucks.org) back when I wasn't checking my email daily. Those five days passed while I was away from the Internet. I did take the stuff down immediately next time I logged on though.

back in the old school world of the printed page, when things moved at a sane enough pace that legal censorship could kill something overnight, there was a concept called fair use which protected the use of copyrighed materials under a number of circumstances, particularly for criticism, review, or parody. This is the same concept that has kept aolsucks alive. If reading the Banc of America web page in redneck doesn't count as parody, I don't know what does.

Indeed, AOL has a long history of crap like the "breast" incident, making them probably the most prudish company on the Internet. Check out more of their handy work here.

AOL told the admins of EFNet that "Life sucks, buy a helmet" when they'd complained about AOL's unresponsiveness. They then voted unanimously to boot AOL. ( ZDNN did a story about it last Novemeber.) And AOL's had trouble with chat before. They also got in trouble with Dalnet, according to an article in the AOL Watch newsletter.

1. AOL whiners that don't understand the meaning of the word volunteer, and are suprised that their free accounts get yanked when they start putting their hands out. (Remember, these are the same people that are enforcing AOL's facist TOS.)

2. Sleazy lawyers that will take any case, no matter how stupid and wrong.

3. Goverment regulators sticking their noses where they don't belong.

4. The sinking feeling that, in the US in this day and age, this whole thing will go much further than it ought to.

I just had to get that off my chest.

1. AOL whiners that don't understand the meaning of the word volunteer, and are suprised that their free accounts get yanked when they start putting their hands out. (Remember, these are the same people that are enforcing AOL's facist TOS.)

2. Sleazy lawyers that will take any case, no matter how stupid and wrong.

3. Goverment regulators sticking their noses where they don't belong.

4. The sinking feeling that, in the US in this day and age, this whole thing will go much further than it ought to.

I just had to get that off my chest.