Replies

First off, there was the issue of signing up more people than they could handle. Secondly, in the good 'ol early days of the net - before Al Gore even knew what the net was and the world wide web was a new concept - the main uses for the net were newsgroups and e-mail. Newsgroups were an early equivelent of e-mail mailing lists, and were relatively difficult to get on to. Unfortunately, AOL's software blurred the lines between their private message boards and the newsgroups, meaning that first time users would post inane messages not realizing the conventions that existed for them. This annoyed old time net users.

Secondly, I doubt there's a person this side of Afghanistan who hasn't been inundated with the stupid start up disks they flooded the rest of the world with. This has annoyed a lot of people.

There are other reasons... do a google search for "AOL sucks"...