Ah, yes. Remember the days before Facebook, when everyone would chat thru AOL Instant Messenger and nothing else. Chat rooms were a thing that middle school kids would do on a saturday night to find out weird things on the Internet. Instant messaging random people and try to “cyber”, which sadly, is still around today. The term “a/s/l pic?” became a popular way to either meet some stranger and/or creep the hell out of them. Then came the WARN button. If you clicked on it, it would add 20% of a warning rate to a person’s screen name. The funny part about the warn button itself, is that it is the only idea that I can think of what a company would institute for its customers to not use their product. It’s like if every Playstation came with a soccer ball. However, with the all-but-certain death to AOLIM, the warn button revolutionized how people would interact with each other.
Recently, cyber bullying has become a recent topic of discussion, yet interacting with each other online has been here for an even longer time. Since people use Facebook chat, G-Chat, Skype, and everything else between, the number of bullied kids has increased because THERE IS NO WARN BUTTON ON FACEBOOK. Something easily attainable with a few friends and some time to ambush them with IM’s. If you warned someone enough, they would be forced offline for at least a couple of hours or at most a whole day. Meaning that AOL is the only Internet company to address cyber bullying before society knew it would turn into a suicidal pandemic. This is something that Marc Zuckerberg and other CEO’s that have user-chat platforms have not addressed, but only come out and denounce. I say, actions, speak louder than words (er, IM’s). Bring back the warn button and cut cyber bullying out of the equation!
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