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Comment by SnowProblem | Hacker News Reader

AOL lumbered on but what finally killed it was broadband and cable. They just didn't have the pipes and the luster was gone by then anyway. DSL gave it some life support but by 2002 or so everyone I knew had switched to cable. AIM use continued for few more years after that until texting killed that too.

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I remember clearly making this transition. The value add of the AOL keyword content and other features like chat rooms just wasn’t enough to make the service make sense after the dial up era.

The innovation of AOL was making such an easy dial up program with so many functions. But when I got DSL it was just money for nothing.

The major lock-in for me was AOL Instant Messenger, which was free as a stand-alone app. Email wasn’t hard to transition because it wasn’t such a dependency for your life like it was today.

So, when DSL came around, AOL was gone. If they could have anticipated something like Discord or Slack, they could have transitioned their users into that free + premium model.

Quite understandable that they didn’t see that coming.

AOL was killed by Internet ISPs. They had to switch to an unlimited usage model, a blow to their bottom line from which they never really recovered. By the time 1995 rolled around there was really no denying it, the Internet and especially the World Wide Web was the place to be and services like AOL were the buggy whip manufacturers of the dot com era.

It is interesting that the data silo model they used is sort of coming back with Facebook and other social media.

AOL offered the ability to connect to it through a 3rd-party internet provider. I did this for probably two or three years before finally giving up on AOL. By that time, the web had evolved quite a bit and AOL's content and communities were no longer worth the extra expense.

>what finally killed it was broadband and cable.

And information. I remember telling so many people that aol was not 'the internet'. Most swapped over to a local isp...with vaguely similar cost but very, very open. Of course, then they all went and jumped on facebook.

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