AOL’s troll-infested collapse freed a huge attention market for successors to capture

Evidence

AOL was an environment guaranteed to attract trolls, given its anonymity and sizable audience. In chat rooms and forums, mischief makers polluted perfectly pleasant interactions with impunity, eventually rendering the whole site noxious in one way or another to all other visitors. … It was as if the entire thing were designed to vindicate Freud’s view that repression of violent or sexual impulses was necessary to a functioning society. There was far more to the decline than just the trolls, but as AOL shed users to the point of collapse, it left in its wake enormous opportunities for anyone who could offer some kind of online place to express social desires and needs without the troll menace. The fall of online’s once mighty oak gave a series of Internet acorns their chance to grow into something quite different in the same niche. A big, proven horde of online attention was up for grabs. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 987

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader reading on attention industries and platform cycles. — connects to: AOL’s closed pay-for-play garden lost to the open Internet’s full variety — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 747; Viral attention mobilized by the internet evaporates as quickly as it arises

Broader Connections

• Viral attention mobilized by the internet evaporates as quickly as it arises #complicates (0.72)