I've said it before and say it again, I firmly think AOL was just ahead of its time.
Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords, search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile app.
Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the bots ruined it all.
Well... advertising as a business model ruined it all. They get paid for getting page views, so the business model optimizes for maximum page views at minimum cost of creation. This is the end result of what Google and Facebook have spent the last 20 years building.
But I'm sure the engineers who built all this have very nice yachts, so it's all fine.
With every passing day I basically think this is going to be the future of the internet. Many disparate private/semi-private groups while the "public" internet becomes overloaded with AI slop.
It's largely already happening in places like Discord.
I think the first company that can capture what Discord has but is not wrapped in that "gamer aesthetic" ui/ux is going to do really well.
Discord is becoming a bloated slop fest. It has literally been implicated at times for bad gaming performance [1]. Remember when it used to just be a chat app? And don't get me started on its "quests" system, which may burst your ideal internet bubble. [2]
i think the problem with revamping Q-Link/AOL into the be-all end-all for everyone (thats human) youre gonna hafta pump the prime with AI chatbots to give the appearance of lots of people to draw you in, kinda like how reddit admins pumped the prime by making tons of posts early on. just a little light treason.
I don't think it works today. You have walled communities in Discord and messaging apps, but if you are looking also for the degree of anarchy in those days, today we know that your everyday person can make money off the internet but you didn't know that then, and I think that colors a lot of the experience.
Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords, search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile app.
Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the bots ruined it all.