Slashdot Mirror
Has AOL Lost Its Sex Drive?
TheViewFromTheGround writes "Why have the years since the merger with Time Warner been so hard on America Online? Michael Wolff, a consultant who advised Time Warner not to buy AOL in the early 90's, says that the the big problem is Time Warner's denial of AOL's core value: a monopoly on dirty chat. The argument says that AOL was successful because they had a critical mass of people and that it skillfully marketed talking dirty by appearing to be family friendly. Now, the old media bedfellow is pushing AOL to stop its pimping ways."
Compared to paying $2.99 a minute for a 976 number
and they're what makes people leave AOL in droves.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Well?
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Time Warner's cable interests carry as much softcore porn as the next guy and that don't seem to bother them none.
AOL's problems are market saturation pure and simple. No ISP can grow like AOL and others did in the late 90s and early 00s for ever.
Put word filters on AIM? That just means the 13 year old punks are going to have to start AIM'ing me with "U R SOFA KING WE TODD DID"
AOL offers a community feel. A safe-place for internet non-newbies to get warm fuzzies and feel happy and loved. Unfortunately, there are so many other online communities that it's no longer necessary to pay $23.95 for constant busy signals.
The primary reason people are still with AOL is that many of their subscribers don't feel like they have a choice. "I can't use something else because I don't know how to switch".
I recently moved my mother-in-law from AOL to Earthlink. She thanks me to this day, even though it's something she could have done.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
like this? If only I knew that AOL came with one of those before!
God Fucking Damnit
400 pound 40 year old bald man AKA SexxyStud91134: A/S/L???
400 pound acne ridden 38 year old balding woman AKA HotMomma92394848: 18/f/Miami u?
SS: 19/M/Denver.
HM: Sounds good, what you look like?
SS: I am 6'5, 250 pounds of tight muscle. u?
HM: 5'5 petite brown hair.
(uploads random amateur porn star jpeg to each other and proceeds to cyber)
Yeah, you know I'm right. And btw, I hate you HotMamma92394848 for ruining my dreams of AOL women!!!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Didn't AOL buy Time Warner?? Shouldn't they be dictating what is going on?
AOL did buy Time Warner, but they helped "pay" for it in AOL stock options...which then proceeded to tank. This did not sit well with the Time Warner people, losing their millions, so they begin clearing the AOL house. I think Steve Case is one of, if not THE, only major original AOL person left and that's because the AOL brand is synonymous with him.
Support bacteria! It's the only culture most people seem to get.
Unfortuntely, it seems like in the exec war TW-ers are winning (if not already won). It was mentioned in some story on /. a while ago. Too bad, as for my own political reasons I regard TW as a major evil[0] whereas AOL as a minor bad thing.
-DVK
[0] As an example, i'm boycotting CNN for the last 3 years 100%, and would switch to aletrnate cable provider in a second had TWC-NYC not been a monopoly where I live (can't have satellite in our building).
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
I don't think I've ever read an article posted here that was such obvious tripe. AOL is not number one because they have sex chat, they're number one because they're EASY TO USE.
Say what you will about AOL's reliability, tech support and the general IQ level of its users, it is and always has been pretty much "click-and-go".
I set it up for people on occasion now and it just works. And when I used AOL in 1991-97 it was easy to use and "just worked" then too.
(remember the DOS interface -- when there were only about 25,000 users?)
load "windows7"
is that in their rush to embrace the Internet they made themselves obsolete. Throughout the early 90's AOL really did provide a lot of value add and made online communities and chatting accessible to the average computer user. By the mid 90's people were still using AOL because it was a safe way to ease into that "WWW thing" everyone was now talking about but still have acess to all that AOL content. Flash forward to the very late 90's and now and AOL has stopped producing anywhere near the amount of content that they used to. All the old cool things like AOL's gaming content just pushes you right back onto the internet. AOL in striving so hard to make sure people could access the internet through them has ceased to have any value beyond that of your basic ISP. All roads from AOL lead out to the internet and eventually most users ask themselves why bother with AOL and its bloated crappy software at all? AOL's user base has "grown up" and the user base which they pull from (newbies) are going to be in shorter and shorter supply as time goes on. Couple that with missing out on being bundled with XP and you see that AOL just don't have that great a future.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
They force you to use their dialer, meaning you can't do simple dial-up networking sharing, auto-dialing. Other ISPs use these but still allow you to set up an (unsupported) PPP connection using standard tools
Said dialer software is full of adverts. AOL/Time Warner removed popup handling abilities from Netscape for this reason, I believe.
At one point, you had to use their own browser
It forces you to have Real Player installed (evil) and complains every time you dial in if you remove it
They ask for your credit card during the trail for verification etc then automatically start billing you without warning. Cancelling used to be difficult and often went "wrong".
You are paying over the odds because the service has great customer help, which is useless to techies. (I'd recommend it to non-techies for this reason tho)
They send junk mail. Lot's of it. Regularly. To the same people.
Said junk mail is not just recyclable paper, it's a cd-rom and a complete waste of resources and bad for environment as it needs to be disposed of in landfills.
Typically, lamers and newbies were on AOL. A large majority of HTML posts to usenet are from AOL and other anti-social net activites are common, hence the term AOLamer
They encourage parents to give up responsibility for their children's safety into the hands of parental controls in software.
They encourage parents to give up responsibility for helping their children with their education since "homework help is just a breeze on AOL"
Their business model depends on people no realising that they are out of free hours and are going to be charged unless they perform some frustrating and time-hungry tasks to cancel the service. Essentially, they depend on the users thinking they know the whole story when really, they don't until they are forced to pay more.
They give a misconception of 'the internet' to new users. Some people think that surfing aol:// addresses means they are on the internet.
They are an ecological menace. Most of the CDs they send out are trashed. Also, consider the waste put out to make the components of the CDs and electricity expended to make something which just fills our landfills faster.
They reward ignorance. They make it acceptable for you to know nothing about computers and be happy with it even though you are using them as an integral part of your life. (Please no automobile analogies.)
The stifle choice. Supposedly part of the big news for AOL 8 is that you can now choose between 8 welcome screens and change the colours of your AOL interface ... oooooh ....
It takes a everything short of a lawsuit to make them stop billing you.
AOL does not introduce people to the Internet, it dumbs down the Internet, thereby hurting the users in the process. 90% of the AOL users I've had to deal with think their Web Browser is the "Internet". And after years of thinking this, it is almost impossible to get them to understand the truth.
AOL harbors undesirable individuals much like certain middle eastern nations harbor militant terrorists. What's worse, with all the free 1000 hour disks floating about, individuals who mean ill to the 'Net at large can easily gain free access over and over to do more damage.
The service is crap. But since most AOL users have been coddled for so long, they CAN'T learn to use anything else; they are stuck w/ sub par service...
If I think of some more reasons (I know there's a few more)... I'll post another response... :P
;-)
Just a few thoughts from the top of my head...
HotMomma92394848 is also a 400 pound 40 year old bald man.
My Dad uses AOL because they provide local dial-in numbers in a large number of countries. He travels a LOT for business, to places like Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, etc. All those places have local numbers where he can dial in and get his email on his laptop.
That DSL line at home isn't going to do him any good then, is it?
Also, he's not a computer geek, so it's not like he cares about getting the latest release of Kazaa or anything.
AOL may not appeal to you, but there are plenty of people out there for whom it works just fine, since their needs aren't very high. YMMV, mang.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The article has an interesting point of view, however I think AOL is failing due to stagnation. The article touches on this a little, AOL hasn't innovated in years. Seriously, no matter how lame AOL is in reality, they did make some great innovations in instant chat. All the new AOL releases over the past 2+ years haven't added much besides a new revision number.
and we were challenged with coming up with room names that might be borderline questionable. One of our jobs was browsing the room names and privatizing names like the one you mentioned. These rooms were still available, but you had to know the room name to get in. I did come up with a room name that no one could ever make a policy decision about whether or not it would be "closed" to the public. My room name was, "Morning Wood on Back Nine".
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
The fall of CNN from reputable news source to racing Fox News to the bottom of the filth was terribly depressing. I used to watch CNN Headline News regularlly. The news moved quickly, the anchors were serious and limited themselves strictly to the news, and the reporting was relatively unbiased for mainstream media. In thirty minutes (any thirty minutes) I could get a quick summary of the world's news. It was perfect background as I went about my mornings.
Then the changes. They got rid of all of the old anchors and replaced them with irritatingly perky youngsters. The broadcasts become full of inane banter between various anchors. They filled the screen with sidebars and tickers and newsflashes. They created more and longer needless story animations (Dum dum dum, *horns*, "The WAR on TERROR " *horns*). Then it happened... near the end of last year (or was it the year before?), the bubbly airhead anchor introduced "a special report on purchasing gifts online." Well, vapid... but I guess. "As reported by our special AOL correspondant." Erm, that's an amazingly uncomfortable conflict of interest. The "AOL correspondant" then proceeded to tell me all the great stuff I could buy using AOL. No web sites, no general tips. AOL specific content. I turned off my television. Years of my watching for a half hour a day, of my general like of CNN HN, destroyed. To hell with big media.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
...the Time Warner people, who know a thing or two about advertising, correctly surmised that advertising was not going to support the Internet. And so the plan was to sell users Time Warner content. (In my personal defense, I kept talking about what a dirty place AOL was -- that the Internet was the porn business. But the feeling seemed to be that, first, I was joking and, second, while new entertainment technologies often started dirty, they soon became much more sanitized and mass-market.) This service, which started in the autumn of 1994 and closed in the spring of 1999, was called Pathfinder and proved two things: Selling Time Warner content on the Internet was pretty much a nonstarter, and the people at Time Warner lacked a certain flair for the Internet. We just don't get it, they said. Which was the essential reason for merging with AOL. [Emphasis mine.]
I'm not sure that Mike's getting it any more than TW. Does anyone with any sense imagine that *this internet thing* is going to fall apart if someone can't figure out how to make money on it with standard advertainment/publimation models? Even in '94. And dirty chat is a killer app?
illegitimii non ingravare
You know, all this "safe internet" shit really bothers me. I'm tired of "kids" movies. I'm tired of "kids" television. I'm tired of hearing everybody kow-towing (is that how that's spelled?) to kids.
All, right, yes, yes, yes: kids are important. I know that. I don't deny that. But for fuck's sake: I'm important, too. And while my idea of decent entertainment isn't hardcore porn 24/7, it's not the teletubbies either. It's not Blues Clues. And it's not all the shit that the networks pimp out during their "safe hours."
I watch the Sopranos because it's entertaining. I don't give a rat's ass if it's goddamn offensive, because life is fucking offensive. Sadaam Hussein is fucking offensive.
Fundamentalist religious idiots offend me. I'm offended by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, all the right-wing religious zealots who appear on late-night cable and who have -- I'll say this now because it's been on my mind for years -- the weirdest fucking hair-dos I have ever seen.
What is it with these wacko Christian fudamentalists? What's with the hair? Why does all their hair -- men, women, it doesn't matter -- swoop and wave and look like Donald Trump on acid?
Speaking of which, Donald Trump offends me.
Bin Laden offends me.
All this terrorism shit offends me. And, no, one man's freedom fighter is not another man's terrorist. If you fucking kill civilians -- innocent men, women, and children -- you're a goddamn terrorist. And you offend me. I don't give a fuck if you think the civilians are paying taxes to the evil government. You don't go killing people who can't defend themselves. Period. If you wanna blow shit up, put on a goddamn uniform, grab your rusty-ass Kalishnikovs, and goddamn claim a fucking state to be your backer. But don't hide in the fucking shadows.
I'm tired of the Anti-Americanism. True, America is big and bad and loud. But we're not the *SOLE* cause of misery in the world. I'm tired of nations who just blame, blame, blame and don't accept even a modicum of responsiblity.
I'm offended by the local news. I'm offended by dippy newscasters who worry about whether or not their colleagues have given them a good "segue" to talk about the next story. Because (a) no one except dippy newscasters give a fuck about "segues" and (b) no one but dippy newscasters tease their fucking audience so much and after *every* fucking segment.
"But will this beautiful weather last? Tune in at 10!"
"But will the snow come? Tune in at 10!"
That offends me. Local news and the way they manipulate you. Not all media offends me. I like the New York Times. But the Chicago Tribune is a fucking joke. There's *nothing* to read in the Tribune. It's like some goddamn newspaper for fifth graders.
Bob Greene creeped me out. But he's gone now. I knew he was bad news years and years ago. I'm disappointed it took this long to toss his ass out of the cubicle and onto the pavement.
I miss Mike Royko. I like eating lunch at the Billy Goat Tavern. I like cheesburgers and Pepsi. So fucking sue me. I like the grease on the burgers.
And I like White Castle. Bring it on, motherfucker. I'll take that bag of fifteen sliders. Sure, I'll get sick after I eat it and shorten my lifespan, but I'd rather shorten my fucking lifespan in one moment of enjoyment than worry about it being prematurely shortened by the four tons of VX that Sadaam has hidden in some Libyan bunker that'll get wheeled out and shipped back to Iraq once the shooting starts.
My point? Life is offensive. Suck it up. I watched my share of Sesame Street and Electric Company and Mr. Rogers, but that's fine. Those shows were there for me. And I appreciated it. Just like Blues Clues and those fucking weird-ass teletubbies "Teletubby Bye Bye" are there, too. But give folks a break. Not everything has to be kid safe.
ANd now, on-topic:
The concept of an internet community is bullshit. AOL was never a goddamn community. It was dirty chat. Who here hasn't dirty chatted on AOL? No one.
And who here realized after you dirty chatting you were chatting to some legless freak that was just duping your sorry ass into thinking, well, maybe this dirty chat stuff isn't so bad after all?
Hell, I remember when AOL started and they charged by the hour. I ran up a goddamn huge ass bill on account of my pud-whacking chats to legless freaks of (most likely) both, neither, either, or sexes. God knows who I was talking to. But, the idea of a community is bullshit. It was just a place to talk dirty and hope for the best.
Cross your fingers, maybe this freak is the girl/guy/whatever of your dreams. But of course it wasn't, and you immediately knew it when, after pressing for more information, you received the IM that said, "Well, wait. Listen. There's something you should know."
Besides, if you want "safe" communities, there's the real world. Don't mistake virtual pudwhacking for real world social interaction. It never was, is, or will be. It's every man and women for themselves, god save the queen, hold your nose, because here I come, baby.
Everybody whacks their puds, lets be honest. But lets at least stand up and like that guy in Network say, "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore." At least not in the virtual wastelands like AOL.
Ever since I've been on, AOL has monitored the language of chat rooms, which is pretty damn annoying, but it explains why you go into a room and no one says anything, we're all IM-ing each other.
Does anyone remember when you get get real porn from AOL picture galleries? It was sometime in the early 90's. When they decided to go "family friendly" they first blacked out all the genital areas, then got rid of the nudie galleries all together.
not only was the sex drive lost, the whole array went down.
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill