AOL’s female user base determined its chat rooms’ mass appeal over CompuServe’s

Evidence

Among the sources of such comfort would be AOL’s infamous chat rooms. Chat rooms had actually been invented by CompuServe in the 1980s (under that ’70s handle “CB simulator”), but AOL allowed the creation of “private rooms,” which anyone could open, hosting up to twenty-three total strangers. By 1997, they would claim to have nineteen thousand different rooms. One key to this success: AOL had female users—not many, but enough to create a completely different atmosphere than the average CompuServe chat room, which might be, for example, a group of dudes conversing in medieval English. CompuServe may have had much the same setup, but being distinctly and persistently inhabited by hard-core computer users and other breeds of geek and nerd, they just didn’t know how to get the party going, not one the general public would care to join anyway. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 707

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the platform economics theme across the book — user-base composition as a causal driver of platform stickiness.