AOL M4M chatrooms

100% yes.

No, they were cliquey. There were "monitors" who kicked people out if they were critical of the cliquey douches.

FFS, pay for Grindr extra or whatever it is called. Then you can filter and block to make the experience more efficient.

About the same.

Pretty much the same old shit hon. Same old picture collectors. Same old Tina queens. Oh and there’s already been a thread on this. It wouldn’t have killed you to have done a search first before you posted this bullshit.

NO FEMMES

NO FATS

NO OLDS!

CB23? It wasn’t as bad as Grindr. Definitely hook up culture but sometimes you’d have actual conversations.

R3 absolutely no one should give any money to Grindr, which is the shittiest app of all time.

Catfishers, pic collectors, trannies, tranny chasers, non binary freaks, socially retarded people of all ages, ugly closet case fugs.

I did like AGGA though -- Ask Gay Guy Anything.

AOL was better you could do a keyword search on profiles and find exactly what you wanted. they used to say it was better than domino's. sex in under 30 minutes

R10, I was a daily fixture in that room. I loved it.

R12, I was a teen then, so I probably asked some dumb questions. Thanks for the advice!

You're welcome. I hope we weren't mean.

R14, not at all. I received very useful tips and advice on AGGA, including tips on what to expect for my 'first time' and useful links to local gay resources and programs. I actually sorta miss late 90s/early 00s internet gay life.

I remember the gay.com chatrooms being very friendly, but I was 22 and 2 hot 2 b believed.

Those AOL chatrooms were competitive to get into as well. I forgot at what number they would max out at (25 people? 30?), but if it was full you had to wait until somebody else exited before you could sneak your way in.

A/S/L?

I'm actually surprised chatrooms died out and message boards are still around.

OP how young are you that you don't remember AOL chatrooms?

[quote] I actually sorta miss late 90s/early 00s internet gay life.

I miss late '90s/early '00s internet life, period - gay or otherwise. It was like the wild west.

Ah AOL chats... the hunting ground of my late teenage years. In 2003, when I had just turned 22 I met a guy as a random hookup. Nearly 17 years later... were still together!

21 y/o, R20.

NYCM4MNOW

Direct IM/AIM chatting seemed to lead to quicker, more efficient hooking up. Everyone canceling AOL (because of cheaper DSL internet) led to the rise of Craigslist M4M. Then the apps took over.

Don’t forget pre smart phone sites like Manhunt or Adam4Adam r25

I remember when I first found the chat rooms. I would have sex every day, even taking an hour off I from work each day to hookup

Your mother must have been so proud, R29!

Finding hookups was easier on aol it even Adam 4 Adam

Even Grindr used to be good. Could find sex that day/hour.

Now it seems like the vast majority are just wasting time and not actually looking for sex in real life

NYCHOTELM4MNOW

[Quote]Now it seems like the vast majority are just wasting time and not actually looking for sex in real life

You've also aged out, r29. Online hookups become scarce after forty.

R31 not if you are in still shape, have a big dick and are an excellent top

Then, the world is your oyster

R31 there actually was hard data that showed a plurality or not a majority of guys on Grindr are not actually looking to meet IRL.

Link r33?

Looking back, Craigslist was actually the most inefficient. Very low-tech -- posting your image on a message board, waiting for email responses, and then endless back and forth.

I loved the str8str8 chatrooms. Met a hot college jock from them.

I met the porn star Hans Berlin on Craigslist r35, before he started doing porn. We became fuck buddies until I moved out of LA. He has hot and nasty.

I loved them. Huge part of my coming out. I dated guys, fucked guys, everything, all thanks to AOL!

OP, AOL also had strict 'conduct' guidelines. If you misbehaved or acted out of line, you could get TOSed (Terms of Service violation), lol -- so that could have contributed to users acting more politely.

R34 this is a different study from the one I remember but still relevant. Will keep looking for the one I’m thinking of.

[quote] Most surprising of all is that 43 percent of users have not met anyone they met on the app in person within the last month; 24 percent state they physically met only one person they met online within the last month.

I met my now husband on the AOL chat rooms. We had a hookup that turned into a relationship. It’s been 20 years together

R33 I worked on a cybersecurity analysis a couple of years back where we plotted the identities and locations of thousands of Grindr users, because it's freakishly easy. It's the same techniques authoritarian governments use to track gay men.

A lot of the "men" on Grindr are actually women who are just there to catfish, even then it was more then 10% of all the users we plotted on the maps were women. That's likely doubled or tripled in the last five years. I won't be surprised if the women are catfishing each other.

Fish catfishing gay guys...I don’t want to live in this world anymore

[quote] worked on a cybersecurity analysis a couple of years back where we plotted the identities and locations of thousands o

Makes sense re: 5 years because I’ve noticed the change in the last 4-5 years. 5 years Prior it was very easy to get sex and hook up vs today

I get how to track locations but how could you track IDENTITIES without some form of PII like the users’ phone numbers or emails?

R44 your profile is wholly exposed, along with your exact physical location. When you turn that off in Grindr, it only disables it in the user interface: the data is still collected and exposed. Even if you turn off location awareness in your phone, relative proximity triangulates position relative to other users.

When we extrapolated user data, we mapped that using geodetic databases which gave us street addresses. From there we easily got phone numbers, cell phone numbers, social media.

R45 interesting.

1. how do you even get the Grindr data? is it publicly availble via an API?

2. in a major city though you can't get phone # from an address with apt buildings that have dozens if not hundreds of people at one address

R46 The Grindr API is crap. You can read about the two succeeding development projects that exposed it, one called FUKR and it's successor called GUKR

R46 We can distinguish you right down to your apartment. We can also identify you in a moving vehicle down a highway. Part of the reason with the location information is Grindr captures your phone number as part of the dataset. This is the embedded data certain governments take advantage of, and how they're able to identify users in countries where being gay is a crime.

The data isn't visible in the application; it's the XMPP message format that enables this which is provided by your device and the location record (on an iphone, for example) through something called Madrid tables. This associates the device id, the device's phone number and the device's exact location which is provided through XMPP back to Grindr. The technical elements here are known as XEP-0004, XEP-0080 and XEP-0122.

This is not a capability that can be disabled in your phone as it's controlled on Grindr's servers.

Geez, that takes me back. Clicking, clicking, constantly clicking, trying to get into NYC M4M chatroom.

The thing about the AOL chatrooms is that there were different rooms for whatever you were interested in. And if you didn't see what you liked, you could make your own chatroom.

And God, there were some hilarious profiles! One I still love to this day wrote, "You said you had a swimmer's build. You didn't tell me that it was like Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure."

Yes they were because there were no phones then to see people's faces.

HOT/ITALIAN/STUD/8"THICK

This never failed to get much attention

R41. Same for me. I met my now husband in an AOL chat room. We decided to meet, and it’s been 18 wonderful years.

This brings me back. I was young and beautiful and getting laid every night after school...I mean work..

So now everyone's conveniently hitched up for 20 years thanks to ole AOL. Lol oh my sides!

R47 when you say”we” are you saying that anyone with good computer programming skills can just access this including phone numbers?? None of it’s secured?

And how can you get apartment number? Even gps data frostbite do well in Vatican space line apartment building s

I met my hubby on AOL. We used to be embarrassed to say we met on the internet. Now, everyone seems to be finding partners, gay and straight, online