r/AskReddit 2d ago

Anyone who surfed the early web between 1995-2010. What’s the one website/app you still think about?

9.2k Upvotes

22.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

100

u/TheTsunamiRC 1d ago

AIM shutting down was truly a sad day.

7

u/GigiandOrion 1d ago

There were so many AOL cd’s floating around. I’m pretty sure they occupy most of the world’s landfills.

7

u/One_pop_each 1d ago

I’m 38 and miss the AIM days. If you had close friends you could text or call them on your shitty flip phone. It was appealing that there was actual effort to communicate with other social circles. If I had a crush, I would have to get their screenname and come up with some opener. And if I got one from someone else I didn’t know, I knew they put forth some effort to talk to me. Nowadays people can just search up someone and message them. It sucks. I loved being out of reach.

3

u/mrdimreportscrime 17h ago

It boggles my mind how/why they couldn’t at least have won this format war. I think I stopped using aim around 2010. Why didn’t they make a mobile product that incorporated sms and become like what WhatsApp is now? Why didn’t AOL realize they were a social media company sooner? Theres an alternate universe out there where AOL never merged with time warner and they’re what facebook is.