Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AOL pretends to be the internet

thehistoryoftheweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 279 posts

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#211

Post by fireshaper »

Arch-TK wrote: post #205
vxNsr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long…

My email is first @ la.st (with the TLD being the last three letters of my last name). People really struggle with this. Websites sometimes reject it on principle that the TLD obviously can't exist.

I'm a huge nerd for TLDs and that's is just awesome. My last name is too obscure to have something that cool but it's so neat to have that as an option.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#212

Post by fireshaper »

vxNsr wrote: post #186
lostlogin wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ever in a tech support role and have to see how people use computers, it’s actually horrific.

I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long…

I am starting to move away from gmail to proton and I had someone ask me if proton.me was a personal domain name. I wish! People expect gmail or other common domains and don't know what to do if you give them something other than that.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#213

Post by actionfromafar »

treesknees wrote: post #152
TreeInBuxton wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people still type "www."? From my experience, yes. I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).

Similar thing happened to us. I had the www redirect but used a .wedding TLD. On the invites I even put the entire “ .wedding/“" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:// .wedding/“ hoping it’d be clear. I’d say a majority of people didn’t recognize that it was a web address and assumed we didn’t have a website.

To be fair “.com” would probably have convinced more of them.

“.wedding” is obviously some cheeky made up thing…

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#214

Post by blamazon »

stronglikedan wrote: post #202
blamazon wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 3 years, when confronted with such a scenario, the people in my life who dislike QR codes have theatrically said something like "what are these stupid computer squares! I want a paper menu damn it!" Whereupon the staff and I share a knowing look, everyone rolls their eyes, and a paper menu is brought forth.

I always ask for a paper menu. Why should I trust them enough to visit an unknown URL on my personal device? Why should they trust the 3rd party service they're likely using to not be malicious? Why should I even be arsed to pull my phone out of my pocket? Plus, paper menus are way easier to see and navigate. Of course, most people aren't "theatrical about it", but I suppose there are a few that are.

Very true and valid points! I'm just not that security conscious with my mobile device I guess. I go to all sorts of unknown URLs on this thing all the time. It's practically the only thing I do with this thing.

To be clear, the eye rolling is about the theatricality of my family members' behavior rather than the request for a paper menu. I would also add to the benefits of the paper menus that it's much more socially cohesive than everyone at the table sitting around staring at their phones, even if there's a common reason to do so.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#215

Post by inversetelecine »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #193
TreeInBuxton wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people still type "www."? From my experience, yes. I am getting merried next month - we have a wedding website via "with joy", which had a URL a bit too long to fit on our wedding invites, so I set up a redirect of "wedding.surname.tld" - the amount of people who messaged us saying the website didn't work, and it turns out they were putting "www." beforehand was staggering (until I added that as a redirect too).

I suppose that could also be an indication that they haven't typed in a URL in a very long time. A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.

Indeed.

Me: Hey checkout .com

Them: type without .com in address bar, click on search results link that may or may not be correct.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#216

Post by scarmig »

vxNsr wrote: post #186
lostlogin wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ever in a tech support role and have to see how people use computers, it’s actually horrific.

I have an email that is firstname@lastname.tld when I tell it to people, or tech support they always first assume I’m an idiot and really meant to say firstlast@gmail.com The tld isn’t com there’s no g in the entire address, but people have a hard time understanding that such a thing is a real email address. I do happen to have that gmail address also, but my name is uncommon and not the easiest to spell, so as long…

I have a catchall for my domain set up, and whenever I give a contact email to any organization, I offer theirdomain.com@mydomain.com. The amount of regular pushback I get from that (or people thinking I work at theirdomain.com, or that I am some kind of idiot) is insane.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#217

Post by inversetelecine »

mk67 wrote: post #204
smcl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine everyone who was a kid during the dial-up times has a horror story of being confronted with an enormous phone bill by their parents. I remember mine going mental at me for costing us £40 one month (normal service was iirc ~£10)

Yep, playing too much Quake online I hit a record 500 EUR phone bill once (1000 deutsche Mark back then). My parents weren't amused. :D

Accidently dialing an non-local number for AOL ended up getting me banned from the family PC for a month. Long distance charges were expensive. (US)

Then we were in Germany in the late 90s and even local calls cost money so one had to be wary of how many hours you were online. Eventually we got flat-rate and ISDN 64k and then 128k but it wasn't long after that we moved back to the US.

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#218

Post by dbsmith83 »

demizer wrote: post #58
cuttysnark wrote: post #28

AOL had a 45 minute idle timeout, meaning you'd be logged out regardless of what was happening on your screen if you weren't moving the mouse or using the keyboard. This was a problem if you wanted to download files and have them in the morning. Making my first "idler" in Visual Basic (which sent a string of whatever song was playing in Winamp to a random AOL chatroom where I was the only person) meant my inactive ti…

AOL gave me my love of programming. I learned how to program in Visual Basic because I wanted to write my own "aol prog". I can still remember the "server" in the Warez room listed VB3.0 as the "the software that is used to make progs". Luckily there were people sharing their code so I could study and figure out how to do it myself. Me and my cousin created a yo momma joke spammer. I was a shit head back then, but it…

Ahh good memories. This is how me and a friend got into programming. We would constantly feud though because he used VB, but I used delphi. Clearly, I was using the superior language :)

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#219

Post by JohnClark1337 »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #179
acjohnson55 wrote: post #162

I remember having AOL back in the very early web days, just after they added the browser. My dad had an "Internet for Dummies" book, which had a directory of websites to try. I, as maybe a 10 year old, could not properly type all the characters in the URL correctly and I gave up on this so-called World Wide Web. It seemed way worse than AOL-proper. Also, at that time, AOL had a much richer user experience than most o…

For many that first went online via AOL, it was revelatory that the web was still accessible even if you didn't use the AOL browser. Most people didn't know what to do with it outside of that, but I suppose that's not any different from today with what Google and Apple are doing with their platforms and apps. Nothing new under the sun, eh?

[dead]

Re: AOL pretends to be the internet

#220

Post by scarmig »

inversetelecine wrote: post #215
washadjeffmad wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that could also be an indication that they haven't typed in a URL in a very long time. A shocking (to me) number of people I work with don't know the URLs of websites they visit every day or that they can go directly to a site by typing in the address in "the search bar". And I mean people who use their computers for a living, not the "smartphone generation" or strangers to the web.

Indeed. Me: Hey checkout .com Them: type without .com in address bar, click on search results link that may or may not be correct.

That's not a terrible approach for some things. If I get a call from my bank telling me to login to my-bank.us or something to deal with a pressing issue, it may well be a phishing attempt, and it's generally a safer approach to google my bank and get to the login page that way instead of using the domain a caller tells you to.
Post reply on HN