Does anyone know when and why the AOL Chatrooms ended?

AOL chatrooms were a pre-cursor to the DL (and Reddit, et al)

I remember being a part of a lot of AOL chat rooms (and GIF exchanges!), including gay gossip, etc ... and next thing I know, I was on the Datalounge.

A friend showed me how to use xnews to view Usenet and whoa Sally!

I miss chat rooms of any kind. I've told this story on here before, but around 2000 (I was in high school), I went on vacation with my aunt, uncle, and cousins.

The night before we left, I spent the night at their house because we always hit the road super early. I stayed up late in their basement, on their computer. I'm pretty sure they had Yahoo, and I found their LGBT chat rooms (or whatever they were called then) and spent almost all night chatting. I don't even know what about, but it was my first, genuine exchange with other gays. It was amazing to feel less alone.

I didn't know anything about internet histories or that the computer would somehow retain a record of my activity.

The second morning of vacation, when the kids were all still in bed, I think I overheard my aunt and uncle discussing something in hushed tones. I always assumed it was the "gay chat room." I worried for a long time they'd confront me, or tell my parents, or something, but ... it never happened. They respected my privacy. I always secretly thanked them for that.

AOL chat rooms were awesome. The birth of cybersex. Loved them, and miss them to this day. Nothing ever came along to replace their unique function.

To the OP, they ended when the AOL software ubiquity ended. They never worked well in a web based format. I remember they tried a couple things, but nothing worked. They were uniquely suited to the AOL software environment, and sadly sunsetted with the software interface.

OP is soon to be a rotting corpse right next to all her AOL cd's.

But OP still needs to use her 500 free hours r6

No year?

Right when AOL started I joined and found a room called TV Chat. Happily, I went in and asked what show they were talking about. There was a very long pause then someone typed Dragnet. It was then that I figured out what TV meant.

Maybe there shouldn’t be chatrooms about sitting members of Congress?