Slashdot Mirror
Does Using an AOL Email Address Suggest You're a Tech Dinosaur?
Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite years of layoffs and tumbling net worth, AOL seemed to get a new lease on life this week when Verizon bought it for $4.4 billion. But even if AOL's still alive, using an AOL email address has long been seen as a way of signaling that you're stuck in the 1990s. A recent analysis of Dice data found that a mere 1.8 percent of those registering for the site used an AOL address, versus 55 percent for Gmail. For the past several years, Websites from Gizmodo to Lifehacker have all declared that still using an AOL email address is counterproductive, to put it mildly. But is that actually true? Do the people in your life and work actually care whether you use AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, or a custom address, or is the idea of 'email bias' an overblown myth?
My dentist uses an AOL email address and a website that probably hasn't been updated in a decade. I don't care: He's still a decent enough dentist for the occasional drill-and-fill.
Dentists: Another reason why birds are superior.
I've done a lot of side work for folks needing computer repair and every...single...one of them that had an AOL email were elderly and not technologically savvy. Personally, I don't care if they have an AOL address or not, but professional businesses not having the @mybusiness.com type of domain and having AOL - I personally find it a little harder to take them seriously and, for the most part, they didn't seem to have as much genuine care for the quality of their work. This should be seen as pure conjecture because I'm sure there are those that don't fit this mold. Just talking about personal experience.
We here at dice plan to mine your data but it's an awful hassle to analyze said data. Please do that for us.
I had my Yahoo email address from the beginning ("Look, ma, no numbers!"), haven't changed my password since then, and still have recruiters calling me for tech jobs in Silicon Valley. Only stupid people discriminate, especially on the basis of email addresses.
AOL still reaches people who can't get broadband and need to use modems. Poor sods.
The thing is, unlike with broadband, where AOL was just some walled garden app and some content sites, with modems, they're actually a real ISP. And they're really the only national modem based ISP still in existence worth talking about.
You don't have to be a little old lady to be using AOL. You just have to live far enough off the broadband network to need to use modems still.
And as someone who worked at AOL itself not so long ago, no one was more shocked than I was when the execs announced that they'd come to the realization that while dialup was declining, it wasn't actually doing so in a precipitous fashion any more. When you take away the loss of all of the broadband adopters, AOL still had a substantial business in dialup, and their dialup infrastructure was paid off and/or low maintenance. AOL, due to its size, is the last man standing from the dialup age.
Dialup will eventually end, but it could take decades to finally drive a nail in that coffin.
It has a warm, true sound that you just can't get from today's CD's and digital music.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
HA! You dope. I just crafted an AOL address THIS YEAR so I could bypass the other email hosting entities idea that my cellphone number is needed to verify that I'm a human, just so I could create a fake Facebook account so I can play games with my daughter without having to stoop so low as to have a real Facebook account. Mailinator was not an option, this worked out great and now I have an old-school aol.com address. I fucking make websites, I don't consume them. AOL is great if you don't want some free email site hounding you for necessary bullshit info, like your fucking cell phone number.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
You'd think that, but the websites he made were all on GeoCities.
This is so cool, I just went and got myself an aol email account based on this article!
The point is, sometimes you WANT to look like a non-techie. Great deception value.
As a former AOL employee - this is false. The corp.aol.com bit came around after 2006 - when company email moved off of aol.com and onto an internal Exchange installation. Those of us on the tech side of the business did often use @aol.net with internally operated smtp servers, however. In fact, it was very difficult internally to *not* use your "Business Screen Name" for official use internally - and that continued until after I quit in 2006.