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  • Hacker News
  • I don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them.

    I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.

  • My wife's grandparents use and pay for AOL. I think they pay for a premium package? All I know is that it handles their internet, web browsing, and email.

    One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed.

    I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.

  • by neom
  • At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...

  • Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B market cap.
  • I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains, mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.

    I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.

  • People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user).

    AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.

    (Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)

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