WHY AOL IS STILL THE PITS

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Back in 1994, when he first logged on to America Online, Dave Cassell was a struggling technical writer intoxicated by the potential of Net life. "I was bleary-eyed and buzzed about the future," he says. "I saw all of humanity coming online." Then one day our hero experienced some of that humanity, in an AOL chat room, where a lesbian and a Christian Fundamentalist were bashing each other. Cassell ended up disgusted--not by the name calling but by AOL's Victorian censorship policy, which resulted in a chat-room monitor summarily booting the lesbian for uttering the word bitch.

The world's largest online service also "supported" a large online anti-AOL club, especially out on the unvarnished stretches of the Net, where folks tend to be anti-censorship and anti-corporate. Cassell discovered them in a fledgling Usenet newsgroup called alt.aol-sucks that he turned into a personal crusade. His gang of malcontents anticipates the demise of the online-service provider as avidly as Rastafarians await the return of King Haile Selassie I. And slowly his anti-AOL avocation has blossomed into a career; Cassell, 34, now supports himself and his cat Tribble almost exclusively by writing about AOL's dark side.

While it was good for his business, Cassell took the news hard last week that the AOL empire was hardly crumbling--and was in fact sucking up 2 million CompuServe users and closing down another portal to the Net. "I'm in denial," he grouses. "CompuServe were the good guys."

You'd expect that an operation with 11 million members (assuming the deal goes through) would have its Bronx cheering section. But the truth is that the usual AOLer's litany of service outages, tortoise-slow E-mail delivery and frequent busy signals is really of "the food stinks and the portions are too small" variety. Cassell tries to dig up meatier bones. He's written about the abuse of those ubiquitous "Five Hours Free!" diskettes that flood the mail. He's written about AOL hackers and AOHell, a program that helps delinquents steal members' passwords. And he's chronicled the AOL censorship policy that led to the banning of more than 100 words from chat-room names, from breasts to boy. On AOL, says Cassell, "even the word forbidden is forbidden." His first-ever act of protest was to write a program that took his collection of members' anti-AOL slogans ("Friends Don't Let Friends Join AOL") and made them scroll by to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance. Later, he put up a popular Website, called AOL Watch www.aolwatch.com) that contains more than 1,600 links to anti-AOL information. A year ago, he began publishing an E-mail screed that now goes out to more than 15,000 people. It's a living, almost.

Sometimes, though, good things come in bad diskettes. When AOL crashed for 19 hours last August, Cassell wrote a takeoff of the classic Don McLean tune, which he titled Bye, Bye Amer'ca Online. ("So bye bye to Amer'ca Online/ Drove my modem to a domain and it's working just fine./ And good old geeks are cheering users offline/ Saying this'll be the day that they die.") Like most amusing online spore, it flew around the Net, causing a number of people to E-mail Cassell their thanks. One of them became Cassell's live-in girlfriend. "So I guess you could say AOL changed my life," he admits. Which might explain why he doesn't do the obvious: cancel his subscription.