idly clicks on buddy list: Personal Profile
Note: AOL member profiles are not accessible through AOL Instant Messenger.
I mean, come on, what is UP with that? -grumbles- Catalyst says AOL sucks. Everyone seems to be down on AOL…
Why does everyone hate AOL?
Where to begin?..
That would be… BECAUSE IT SUCKS!
I have been on aol for about seven years now, and it has gone from mere deep sucking to full-tilt-boogie, dyed-in-the-wool deep down sucks-from-the-air sucking more than the near perfect vacuum of intergalactic space. All of it. In fact, the only reason the entire internet did not collapse with the untimely demise of the World Trade Center(and all it’s associated networks) is that AOL sucks hard enough to keep it inflated despite the byte leaks.
If I could get ANY other internet service in my area I would have it in a heartbeat.
b.
[sub]okay so byte leakage may only be a theory of mine with no relation to real world events real or imagined[/sub]
I used to have AOL. The only things I could use on it were the e-mail and instant messages. Whenever I tried to search for a web site, it would freeze. Every. Single. Time. We got rid of it pretty quickly, needless to say.
well, I’m gonna just respond to your specific comment about AOL member profiles not being available through messenger. I’ve got AOL, and I found when I had it set so that everybody could IM me(AOL users and messenger users), the vast majority of my time online was spent closing IM windows offering me porn from messenger users. So I’m guessing that AOL is hoping to cut down on that by blocking member profiles from messenger users. It’s a lot harder to find a valid screenname if you can’t search member profiles. Whether AOL sucks in other ways is another question.
-Lil
“So easy to use, no wonder it’s #1!”
Given the intelligence level of the average American, that should be enough explanation right there.
I used one of the free AOL disks i had lying around right after i moved, before i’d found a decent “real” isp, and i immediately understood why everyone seems to hate it. it was painfully slow and as FireUnderpantsBoobs pointed out, it froze up frequently. on top of that, it just seemed too… easy. too idiot-proof i suppose. the internet is pretty easy to navigate w/ plain old Netscape or IE, but AOL seemed to dumb it down even more.
Too many, obnoxious advertisements, for a service that is paid for.
Bad content.
A pervasiveness of stupid members.
Ridiculous censorship rules.
Slow connection speeds (if you’re lucky enough to win the modem lottery.)
Buggy software.
Steve Case is a putz.
A history of poor security (or complete lack therof. Back in the day, you used to be able to access one of the core administration functions just by knowing the secret keyword. (Security by obscurity is not security.))
Terrible, un-trained technical support staff for whom you must wait on hold for very, very long times.
See number 3.
Because they kicked out the Straight Dope from its original Internet home when users started spending too much time with us!
Ok, I’ll be serious now. I’ve had with AOL since '95 but never encountered FUB’s freezing problem until last year. This problem was pretty much corrected when I did a fresh install of Win98. Now freezing is nowhere near the nuisance that it was; I mainly get the occasional error or dropped connection. IMHO, there is no “perfect” ISP but AOL, even with all its faults, is better than my other options.
Regarding friedo’s comments:
What content are you referring to? And bad compared to what?
So stay out of chat rooms!
This I agree with. Angie’s brother had a name on her account while he was living with her. He forwarded a pic of some naked guy to a friend of his, this guy subsequently forwarded it to a woman who ended up raising a big stink. Angie, her brother, and his friend all lost their AOL access.
I have a 56K modem and regularly connect at 115K. This is slow?
That has not been my experinece. I think you’re confusing AOL with StarPower.
Sorry Jeff Olsen. If you have a 56K modem you cannot connect at anything over 53k, despite what AOl displays in the connection speed icon (which has been dropped in Ver 6).
Then when AOL dials up, what’s the “connected at 115600” all about?
It’s a lie.
Regarding your comments on technical support staff, this was many, many years ago when I used AOL. I haven’t used it since 1995 or so.
IIRC that is effective data transfer with compression. FCC regs limit actual thruput to 53K. That’s where Friedo got the #. Think of it like transferring zipped files.
I went to Google and found that my AOL software isn’t lying; it’s confusing DTE (PC/Modem) and DCE (Modem/Modem).
I, for one, have no problems with AOL. Any problems I had with regard to slowness or my system freezing was because my computer sucked and I was using a 56K modem. Now that I’m on a real computer with a cable modem, I have no problems whatsoever.
Yeah, a few extra ads are a pain, but that’s about it. Reliable e-mail, reliable connection, the chat rooms, IMHO, are more than adequate to meet my minimum dating requirements. 
All my friends are on AOL or AIM, so I can chat with just about whoever, and any unsolicited IMs are easily blocked (I never get porn ones from AOL itself, always from AIM, and those are prefaced by a “Do you want to accept this IM?” dialog, so if I don’t know them, it’s a “no”). One of the advantages of being on AOL is that AIM people, as the OP says, can’t read my profile or get into chat rooms, so I’m not being bombarded by a million non-AOL users who I couldn’t report to AOL TOS if they pissed me off; at least AOL users who IM me out of the blue have probably looked at my profile first, and if they piss me off, I can get their accounts revoked.
I’ve been a member since probably '93 or so and have no plans to ever change.
Esprix
Regarding AOL’s so-called tech-support:
About two years ago, when I finally ditched AOL for the joys of cable modems and deleted AOL from my system, I started getting a “Searching for AOLtray” message whenever I booted up. I called tech support, who gave me reams of useless advice and then tried to convince me to rejoin. (“If you re-install the software, that problem should clear right up” Grrr…) Finally I gave up. After six months of seeing that damned little window everytime I turned on my PC, I found The Straight Dope. A few days after I registered, I made an off-the-cuff reference to this problem in a bash-AOL thread. The very next poster to that thread told me how to fix it, and that with almost no info about my computer. That’s one reason why I hate AOL, and one reason why I love The Dope.
This is the part I don’t get (I have never used AOL and hope I never have to):
On my dial-up ISP ($17.95 a month), Reliable email? Yep. Reliable connection? Yep, I never, ever got kicked off, EVER! Chat rooms? IRC & ICQ work too - for FREE. Ads? Nope, sorry. Ads annoy me to no end, but getting ads in a service you pay for? Why?
Takes over your computer? Again no, a normal ISP is simply a connection, there is nothing installed, nothing added to f*ck up your whole system. So why do people still use AOL? The cons seem to far outweigh the pros.
Their billing people. I got billed for three months’ service after I cancelled. Bastards.
And everything else, too. Anything I ever did on AOL is available, and much more easily, elsewhere online.
Another problem with AOL is that if you try and have a game of Quake, or whatever, with somebody over the internet, the bastard thing locks up and cuts you off!
AOL “do what with our bandwidth (that you pay £15.00 a month for), you must be joking” 
Does anyone else have this problem??
Oh, and I have to refresh the page every other website
I think, a 512k cable modem is going to have to be installed soon. 
ugh.
i have to use AOL because my mom has difficulty using IE.
me, generally i just leave PVP (with it’s elf reloading banners) open in my AOL window so it doesn’t kick me off, and do everything through IE.
i want a cable/DSL system so bad… i might just try and convince my dad (who does the same thing as I) to get one and force my mom to adjust…
but still as yet…
it’s always gonna be AO[sub]he[/sub]L[sub]l[/sub] as far as i can see.