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Rotten Dot Com

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Re: Rotten Dot Com

#101

Post by tempaccount5050 »

retired wrote: post #45
INTPenis wrote: post #6

I didn't realize why until much later into adulthood, but I was one of those teenagers fascinated with rotten.com, and all the other weird sites out there during this time. Looking back it was innocent exploration, but if I did what I did then today, I might get put on some watchlist. And today I can barely watch an arm breaking contest without cringing. Anyone else remember orsm, b0g? They rarely get mentioned among…

Back then you had to go to Rotton to see dead bodies. Nowadays you can go to a mainstream news website. It's wild how national news websites will just have a casual warning of "O hey, the video you are about to see has dead people, just letting you know!"

A motionless dead person is a far cry from a soldier getting his head sawed off by a jagged bayonet and screaming through a gash in his neck while he chokes on his own blood.

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#103

Post by bitwize »

rpi_rpi wrote: post #9

The most haunting image I remember from that website was a photograph of a young boy who'd had his lower jaw cut off to punish his mother. It has stuck in my mind for nearly three decades. How could someone do that to a child? Horrifying.

I remember one of these sites had an image of a man who was a victim of a failed suicide attempt by "suck-starting a shotgun". The entire lower half of his face had been blown off. He was still alive.

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#104

Post by 47282847 »

Kovah wrote: post #23
INTPenis wrote: post #6

I didn't realize why until much later into adulthood, but I was one of those teenagers fascinated with rotten.com, and all the other weird sites out there during this time. Looking back it was innocent exploration, but if I did what I did then today, I might get put on some watchlist. And today I can barely watch an arm breaking contest without cringing. Anyone else remember orsm, b0g? They rarely get mentioned among…

It's kind of a miracle that most of us people who got exposed to all that stuff are still sane.

It is. Something happened later in my life that opened the floodgates to all kinds of unprocessed shit I’ve watched as kid and early teen. I don’t wish that on anybody. It’s not so much the watching itself, it is often more the lack of talking about it with any adult at the time. (Which I didn’t experience as problematic back then, to the contrary, I felt very strong and adult-like).

It is actually a well researched topic in psychology. See “vicarious trauma”, “secondary trauma”, etc. - also, see PTSD from content moderation. Similar for war journalists. They can do it for a decade or two, until one story gets under their skin, and then they’re confronted with decades of material, which at the time of watching didn’t phase them at all.

The argument “but then we should see more cases” is misleading, because similarly to “a little spanking didn’t hurt me” the psyche is good at avoidance - with the negative side effects of that avoidance equally well researched and documented. For example, perception of others might be influenced without grounds in reality, and this wrong perception is subsequently passed on to children.

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#105

Post by 47282847 »

rockskon wrote: post #46
pegasus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma. How do we know this? All I've seen so far is anecdata. As my own anecdata, an ex of mine felt she had been traumatized by watching horror movies at a very young age. Many years later she still had flashbacks.

Statistical anomalies exist, sure. But if there was any meaningful negative impact at scale, you'd think it would've shown up over the decades in trending therapy topics, to people bringing up traumatic memories of the old Internet, to....to something at scale.

Even if it were reported at scale to each and every therapist, they rarely share even anonymized stories with others. Anecdata: I’ve talked to a bunch, and processed some of that shit, but nobody else hears.

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#106

Post by actionfromafar »

anal_reactor wrote: post #72
vova_hn2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think that it actually shows that the idea that information can cause "trauma" or another kind of "harm" unless some third party forcefully restricts your access to this information, is completely insane. Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.

I think that gore is an easy scapegoat because this allows us to shy away from the difficult discussions. "We should ban porn" occupies the bandwidth of social discourse, and therefore we cannot discuss topics like "ok but really, what do we do about the demographic collapse". I honestly think that the kids growing up now are going to be much more traumatized by the fact that they'll find themselves in a world of ins…

OTOH inflicting death and misery was also pretty normal.

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#108

Post by jfengel »

zafronix wrote: post #15

Rotten.com felt like one of the first moments where the internet stopped pretending to be curated civilization and instead exposed itself as raw human curiosity. People often remember the gore, but what I remember more was the texture of the early web: sparse HTML, no engagement optimization, no algorithmic feed, no “creator economy.” You had to intentionally go looking for things. That changed the psychology complet…

Usenet was full of people at their most, uh, uncivilized. It was there well before the Web.

Its format was even sparser, pure text, with pictures crammed in there by brute force.

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#110

Post by rockskon »

only-one1701 wrote: post #64
rockskon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistical anomalies exist, sure. But if there was any meaningful negative impact at scale, you'd think it would've shown up over the decades in trending therapy topics, to people bringing up traumatic memories of the old Internet, to....to something at scale.

Just because it can’t be easily measured doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

No, but there's rough heuristic that are generally reliable. Psychologists talk. If a problem is recurring - they talk a lot amongst each other regarding the prevalence of the problem.

I don't recall there ever being a trending issue among psychologists - child or otherwise - dealing with clients who have been traumatized about the minimally restricted Internet of the 90's and 00's.

But if you don't trust this heuristic, then tell me - what distinguishes the belief that seeing horrible content on the Internet in the 90's and 00's led to a large number of traumatized individuals vs the belief that the ready availability of horrible content hurt a statistically negligible number of people and that it was a significant net benefit?

Actions and policies should be based on something more than intuition and belief alone.

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