The flood of AOL email addresses was bad because it heralded many clueless people into the Internet who were disruptive to the established culture.
Firstly, that's just plain elitist. The notion that the internet would be somehow better if clueless people weren't able to use it is ridiculous. Arguably the fact that AOL (and others) lowered the intellectual barriers to entry by taking an exceptionally complicated system and making it easy to understand was just a forerunner to today's UX revolution - taking complex, and consequently expensive, products and services and making them trivially easy to use is the USP of many, many start-ups. We don't say that Dropbox users are clueless when they choose not to manually configure file replication across their computers.
Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s, I can absolutely assure you that there were clueless people on every ISP. AOL was the biggest but the fact that someone had a non-AOL email account was not an indicator they were any smarter.
Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s,
That's well after the great AOL flood happened. Which was mostly on Usenet and mailing lists.
If you weren't there of course it sounds just like a bunch of jerks being jerks, but really it was pretty horrible. Once AOL gave out Internet access to all of its users, the signal to noise ratio on Usenet and many mailing lists went to crap. Usenet never really recovered and became mostly a place for binary distributions of questionable legality, rather than discussions.
In the long run of course more people on the Internet made the web what it is today, and for a short while it heralded cheap, high performance home internet (which then stagnated at least in the US.)
Look, the whole AOL thing is old news and I pretty much never bring it up unprompted. But the author brought it up. And he misunderstood why the flood of AOL addresses on the Internet in the mid 90s was a bad thing. It wasn't just because aol.com was ubiquitous. It was that the aol.com email address usually signified an ignorance of Internet norms, technology, etc.
Pre-AOL, most people on the Internet were either there because they were at a college (student or faculty), or because they purposely sought out a provider which usually wasn't advertised or widely known.
Really AOL is to blame for giving their users access to this new place without telling them any of the etiquette of that place. It's like WalMart buying country club membership for all of its customers without letting them know they need to step up their normal attire.
Usenet didn't die because of signal to noise, it died because over the history of the internet people have been moving from communication to broadcast. (Mail -> Usenet -> Web Forums -> Facebook -> Twitter).
Each step becomes more like "One to Many" broadcasts.
Err, no. Your analogy sounds great but doesn't hold up at all.
In fact, the percentage of people you'd reach in a given Usenet forum far eclipsed what you'd reach on most any web forum when people first started switching. And most people on Twitter don't have many followers.
It's not about reaching more people, it's about where the people you want to associate with are.
Yes, people did abandon Usenet because of the signal to noise ratio, and people abandoned web forums for the same reason nd will eventually abandon Facebook and Twitter for the same reasons.
I can't speak about AOL because I never used it, but I imagine the parent is talking about how apps like Outlook killed email conversation threads. [Edit: apparently that's not what parent was talking about, but I'm happy to take the opportunity to rant about a pet gripe anyway]. Far from simplifying email, they took a fairly straight forward system and complicated it to the point that nobody understood how to use it any more.
Specifically, they made conversations almost impossible to have by making top posting of replies the default, coercing the user into a behavior model that was contrary to the best practices that had been established by users of email to that point. The predictable result of this is that people stopped bottom posting and conversation threads were made practically impossible.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is why forums took over from mailing lists. I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why Gmail became so popular, because it fixed a problem that should never have existed: it made conversations comprehensible again.
So while I wouldn't blame newbies for breaking email, there is definitely a strong correlation, and it's because of the inadequate tools they were provided with in those early days.
I've never been sold on the bottom-reply. Sure, if you're new to the thread it becomes easier to follow from the last, but if you're following from the first message it's a pain to scroll down to the bottom of every message to get what's new.
I would say I haven't seen an argument to convince me bottom-replys are better, but I honestly have never really discussed this with someone who cared.
Part of the etiquette of email, before gmail arrived and did everything for you, was that you elided irrelevant parts of email quotes. You don't leave the entire thread in situ; you only quote the parts of the message you are specifically respond to, or that are material to understanding the exchange.
The massive pile of shit problem is new to Outlook and Gmail.
Leaving the entire thread in was happening long before gmail.
So, bottom-first people are essentially don't-quote-irrelevant-crap people? In which case it would make sense to place the quote you're responding to above your response.
Comments
The flood of AOL email addresses was bad because it heralded many clueless people into the Internet who were disruptive to the established culture.
Firstly, that's just plain elitist. The notion that the internet would be somehow better if clueless people weren't able to use it is ridiculous. Arguably the fact that AOL (and others) lowered the intellectual barriers to entry by taking an exceptionally complicated system and making it easy to understand was just a forerunner to today's UX revolution - taking complex, and consequently expensive, products and services and making them trivially easy to use is the USP of many, many start-ups. We don't say that Dropbox users are clueless when they choose not to manually configure file replication across their computers.
Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s, I can absolutely assure you that there were clueless people on every ISP. AOL was the biggest but the fact that someone had a non-AOL email account was not an indicator they were any smarter.
That's well after the great AOL flood happened. Which was mostly on Usenet and mailing lists.
If you weren't there of course it sounds just like a bunch of jerks being jerks, but really it was pretty horrible. Once AOL gave out Internet access to all of its users, the signal to noise ratio on Usenet and many mailing lists went to crap. Usenet never really recovered and became mostly a place for binary distributions of questionable legality, rather than discussions.
In the long run of course more people on the Internet made the web what it is today, and for a short while it heralded cheap, high performance home internet (which then stagnated at least in the US.)
Look, the whole AOL thing is old news and I pretty much never bring it up unprompted. But the author brought it up. And he misunderstood why the flood of AOL addresses on the Internet in the mid 90s was a bad thing. It wasn't just because aol.com was ubiquitous. It was that the aol.com email address usually signified an ignorance of Internet norms, technology, etc.
Pre-AOL, most people on the Internet were either there because they were at a college (student or faculty), or because they purposely sought out a provider which usually wasn't advertised or widely known.
Really AOL is to blame for giving their users access to this new place without telling them any of the etiquette of that place. It's like WalMart buying country club membership for all of its customers without letting them know they need to step up their normal attire.
Usenet didn't die because of signal to noise, it died because over the history of the internet people have been moving from communication to broadcast. (Mail -> Usenet -> Web Forums -> Facebook -> Twitter).
Each step becomes more like "One to Many" broadcasts.
Err, no. Your analogy sounds great but doesn't hold up at all.
In fact, the percentage of people you'd reach in a given Usenet forum far eclipsed what you'd reach on most any web forum when people first started switching. And most people on Twitter don't have many followers.
It's not about reaching more people, it's about where the people you want to associate with are.
Yes, people did abandon Usenet because of the signal to noise ratio, and people abandoned web forums for the same reason nd will eventually abandon Facebook and Twitter for the same reasons.
I can't speak about AOL because I never used it, but I imagine the parent is talking about how apps like Outlook killed email conversation threads. [Edit: apparently that's not what parent was talking about, but I'm happy to take the opportunity to rant about a pet gripe anyway]. Far from simplifying email, they took a fairly straight forward system and complicated it to the point that nobody understood how to use it any more.
Specifically, they made conversations almost impossible to have by making top posting of replies the default, coercing the user into a behavior model that was contrary to the best practices that had been established by users of email to that point. The predictable result of this is that people stopped bottom posting and conversation threads were made practically impossible.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is why forums took over from mailing lists. I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why Gmail became so popular, because it fixed a problem that should never have existed: it made conversations comprehensible again.
So while I wouldn't blame newbies for breaking email, there is definitely a strong correlation, and it's because of the inadequate tools they were provided with in those early days.
I've never been sold on the bottom-reply. Sure, if you're new to the thread it becomes easier to follow from the last, but if you're following from the first message it's a pain to scroll down to the bottom of every message to get what's new.
I would say I haven't seen an argument to convince me bottom-replys are better, but I honestly have never really discussed this with someone who cared.
Part of the etiquette of email, before gmail arrived and did everything for you, was that you elided irrelevant parts of email quotes. You don't leave the entire thread in situ; you only quote the parts of the message you are specifically respond to, or that are material to understanding the exchange.
The massive pile of shit problem is new to Outlook and Gmail.
Leaving the entire thread in was happening long before gmail.
So, bottom-first people are essentially don't-quote-irrelevant-crap people? In which case it would make sense to place the quote you're responding to above your response.